Christal Cooper
Helene Cardona’s Life in Suspension: Elation &
Peace In A Magical World
Introduction
In June of 1995 I was going through clinical
depression without relief. Then on
Friday, June 31, 1995 my boyfriend (now husband) took me to see Pocahontas. The
colors, the nature scenes, the music, the entire movie took me away to a different
realm, where I was mesmerized and for the next 81 minutes I didn’t experience
depression, but elation.
It is a very depressive time for our world: It is the 15th year anniversary of
9/11, ISIS is a threat, gun shootings are a threat, police shootings are a
reality, and the individuals running for United States President are scaring
both sides of the fence. These events along
with other issues of our day are dominating our poetry world, which is a
necessary thing, but there also needs to be poets that bring us into a world
where it is safe, beautiful, and peaceful; in other words poets that give us
that elation I experienced watching Pocahontas 21 years ago.
Helene Cardona’s poetry collection Life
In Suspension does the same thing.
It takes the readers to places of safety and excitement, gives them a
sense of peace, and a oneness with God/Higher Power/Universe which usually
cannot be found in most of today’s contemporary poetry.
photo attribution Adrian Carr
Life In Suspension published by Salmon Poetry Press is a bi-lingual
edition with the poem in French on the left side and the poem in English on the
right side.
www.salmonpoetry.com
Place in Life In Suspension
The highlight and titled poem “Life In
Suspension” is a detailed description of the places the speaker of the poem has
lived or visited, matched with a memory.
It is here that place becomes memory and memory becomes place.
Let me introduce
myself
I’m the Memory Collector,
your companion and spirit guide
Let’s unwind the
clock, peel the past.
In the last two lines of the first stanza the
speaker of the poem describes what her goal is in unwinding the clock:
So they can revisit
and reinvent who you are.
Let the dance begin.
The dance begins with the speaker of the poem in
her mother’s womb in Paris, and continues for the next sixteen years
Brother Rodrigo, Helene, and mother Kitty in Florence, Italy.
A memory is attached to every single year that the speaker of the poem encounters a different place: France, Switzerland, Monaco, Spain, Wales, England, Germany, New York, and California.
Helene in Spain
Helene attending the Geneva Music Conservatory
Helene in Peru
A memory is attached to every single year that the speaker of the poem encounters a different place: France, Switzerland, Monaco, Spain, Wales, England, Germany, New York, and California.
Photo of where Helene and her family lived at the foot of Jura Mountain
Helene in Paris, France
The goal is not to simply remember but to
remember just enough loss to let go, in order to experience newness with peace
and confidence. The eulogy poem "Ex Temper" dedicated to her brother Rodrigo is an example of how Cardona does this through her poetry.
Left, Rodrigo and Helene in the southwest of France.
Right, Helene and Rodrigo in Villars, Switzerland where they would ski.
As autumn deepens, he lives parallel lives.
Unlike his body, he seems at peace. All I can think is, please God spare him.
Right, Helene and Rodrigo in Villars, Switzerland where they would ski.
How do we embrace our new mature selves
without having to forsake who we once were?
How do we let go of old memories just enough to create new ones? The speaker of the poem answers those
questions in the last stanza.
I’m learning to let
go, trust the ripeness of the moment.
That everything
happens at the right time.
To appreciate what I
have.
I’m connected to my
bones,
filled with the richness
and texture of space, uplifted,
vibrating,
reverberating. I become the sound
of Tibetan bells,
echoing and hovering in the cosmos.
I perceive the whole
world below, life in suspension.
In “El Recuerdo” Cardona remembers the
first time she visits her grandparents in Tarragona on her own at the age of
six. Her grandmother gives her a cookie
and this cookie symbolizes a new memory, a new place, and a new language.
Helene with mother Kitty, brother Rodrigo, and paternal
grandparents, in Ibiza, Spain.
My grandmother offers
me a unique and plain cookie
of the kind I haven’t
encountered anywhere else
and utters the magic
word, galleta.
This is the first word
I learn with her.
We watch a game on TV,
el juego de la oca,
and these become the
next words.
That is how, enveloped
in unconditional love,
I discover the
language of Cervantes
and of God, as it’s
been called.
Miguel de Cervantes
Animals in Life In Suspension
Animals are the portals through which the
reader of these poems can travel to peaceful places, experience the oneness of
God, and become companions to the animals themselves.
Helene as a little girl with her pet dog
In “Eagle”, the eagle is a symbolism of
God, poet, angel, and the time capsule the speaker of the poem experiences, which
guides her to exorcise painful memories, in order to experience divinity.
Image of eagle attributed to Tony Higgett of Birmingham, UK
me in Eagle form,
reawakens
old scars, swallows
space and love, dissolves
into divine silence.
The universe cannot
resist
a poet like him.
In “Ritual” the speaker of the poem meets
her soul-mate in the form of a seagull. The seagull combs her hair with the
wind, and keeps “taunting/ me, blowing love’s echo in the night.” Using the word taunting to describe this
union seems inappropriate because taunting usually implies mocking or insulting
an individual in a malicious way. But
there is another definition of taunting, which is to tease and excite
sexually. In this stanza the seagull is
taunting the speaker of the poem not for sex, but to strip off all barriers in
order to experience a spiritual euphoria called eternity.
Seagull photo attributed to Jiang Chen
It keeps waking me,
taunting
me, blowing love’s
echo in the night.
Just me and time is
all it takes.
Eternity swallowed
that simple.
Another
way to describe this is seduction but this is a wholesome seduction, for the
betterment of the person being seduced.
How I disappear in
azure eyes.
Words pulsate in my
blood,
I can read ad
infinitum,
wishing the road never
ends.
Soon
the speaker of the poem’s world is no longer a dream but now a spell with a sky
full of birds.
Sky full of red-billed birds, CCBYSA 2.0
The sky fills with
hundreds of birds
who witness the sun
steal away, the day die
as your smile eclipses
the light
and turns the dream
into a spell.
In “How God Thinks Is Surprising” the
speaker of the poem and her mother are two swans acting in a play that is
directed by God. In the poem, mother and
daughter transform into an angel.
We’re part of each
other,
a continuation of
movement, dance, beauty.
Together we form a
whole, a heart, an angel.
Kitty, her friend Marieluise and Helene in Karben,
Germany.
The angel is now able to conquer time by making it disappear and as it disappears the closer mother and daughter grow to God.
We invented time.
The more we make it disappear,
the closer to God we
grow.
In the last stanza Cardona gives us her
own testimony of why animals are so important in her poetry, particularly this
book of poetry:
Painting from jacket cover of Dreaming My Animal Selves
I like morphing into
an animal,
devouring who I was.
The earth never fails
me.
Metaphysical poetry in Life In Suspension
Helene Cardona’s Life In Suspension could
be described as metaphysical poetry, coined
by Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of
17th-century English poets whose work was characterized by highly
intellectualized thinking with the use of conceits (extended metaphors or
paradoxes) to create a new poetic thought.
These extended metaphors or paradoxes have no direct relationship. An example is a person transforming into a swan, then an angel, and a wolf. There are no specific connections between the three and these transformations are impossible in our world. This makes the poems magical, lyrical and an example of metaphysical poetry.
These extended metaphors or paradoxes have no direct relationship. An example is a person transforming into a swan, then an angel, and a wolf. There are no specific connections between the three and these transformations are impossible in our world. This makes the poems magical, lyrical and an example of metaphysical poetry.
However, the metaphysical I experienced
in Cardona’s Life In Suspension is not necessarily a form of poetry but a
place that I as a reader travel to and explore.
back jacket cover of Life In Suspension
For Cardona the place of the metaphysical
is a way for her to unite with her mother, who has since passed. She unites with her mother in “Patience”
and joins her there in the wild grass garden where her mother patiently waits
for her.
Left, Kitty in Switzerland. Right, Helene with her father.
In “Winter Horse” the speaker of the poem goes through different worlds as her mother “blows directions in my ear”: edge of life, endeavor, the road, end of the skyline, and the land of shadows.
Hélène riding her favorite horse Sherwood in Vermont.
In “Mind Games” the two selves of the
speaker of the poem catch up with each other on the “lee shores of the Moon.”
The Earthrise from the Moon - Apollo 8 1968
In “A Mind Like Lightning” the speaker of
the poem becomes part of the universe –as place and identity:
Without gravity
I fly into a thousand pieces,
add sparkle to various reflections ―
fallen
stars, colliding lights ―
transform particles, waves, and dark
matter.
I become ocean,
mercury, silver
shimmers, fairy tales, fascinated.
The strangeness of
this atmosphere
seduces, shifts consciousness,
shapes bloodstreams,
provokes a rush.
In the last four lines of the poem
Cardona becomes the seducer, seducing her readership to a new world where
fighting ceases, and the readers become prosperous poets.
Let the next dimension
pull you,
lightning-mind, prosperous poet,
duellist without a
fight.
Let the lake talk, embrace it.
Conclusion
Cardona’s
Life
In Suspension gives its readership an escape from this world by
transforming all of us into safe, exciting, and magical worlds, one of which is
described in the last poem of the collection:
Spellbound
Fall asleep at the
lake
tonight, no boundaries,
like a fairy.
I am the eagle song, a
calling, light
defying gravity,
someone to steal
horses with, a case of
mistaken identity,
tears transforming
into fish in the air,
a force that propels
forward, proclaims
who I am with a
passport from God,
Her will an explosion,
with bullets
for words. I offer you everything:
stardust, silence,
impish grace
and flutes like
birdsong ― mischievous,
good and bad, pulled
out of myself into
the spell. I ask the
unthinkable,
move so fast,
breathless, delicate
craftsmanship. I walk on all fours,
elongated, neither
human nor animal,
a creature you only
see in magic.
Helene Cardona and Poet John FitzGerald
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