Readr Books 27
Bringing current social issues to readers around the world through a selection of literary works from across the European Union.
The poet and critic Ján Gavura has coined the phrase “oko kameramanky” (camerawoman’s eye), referring to her work as a lecturer on film. This is slightly misleading for Anglophone readers for whom Isherwood’s “I am a camera” belongs to another era of realism in writing. Mária is not a realist in that sense at all. Certainly there is an ability to switch visual perspectives in the space of a single poem, to zoom in and out. In “Threatened Species,” the sequence opens with a view from space: “The view from above doesn’t belong to a god / but a satellite”; but by section ten we have a microscopic viewpoint: “we examine the skin on faces, / maps of blood vessels, craters for cells.” There is also a merging of the self with the environment; human beings in Mária’s poems are also animals and not separated from the environment. Often in her poetry the body becomes both exterior and interior landscape, a juxtaposition of macroscopic and microscopic vision akin to the hermetic doctrine of “as above, so below.” I read Mária’s poetry with same excitement that I first read the English Metaphysicals many years ago.
