Yours, Purple Gallinule

In Yours, Purple Gallinule, Ewa Chrusciel asks, “When does the poet start diagnosing birds and the psychiatrist start writing poems?” (p. 49). This conversion is only one of the many in Chrusciel's latest hybrid text, her fourth collection in English, a complex textual montage of personal memory poems, “Tiny Throat Diagnoses,” reflections from “mental aviaries,” and meditations in which she investigates identity, transformation, and mental health. Using research on and symbols of birds through history and across cultures, along with personas of a poet and a psychiatrist, the meditations and narratives unfold, playfully illustrated by Nancy Sepe. Chrusciel's publisher, Omnidawn, describes the book as a “lyrical satire” of a “society that tends to over-diagnose, misdiagnose, over-medicate” (copyright page). In her final “Tiny Throat Revelations,” the poet claims outright that she “internalized Wisława Szymborska's poem “Advertisement”—in which “the devil entices a human to sell her soul” for a psychiatric pill—and learned “to stigmatize mental illness” growing up in Poland (p. 92). This new work seems to follow Chrusciel's conversion, like her psychiatrist, from classifying illnesses to dwelling in “astonishment” and instead striving for “humor, beauty, humanity, and most of all balance” (p. 92).In “A Poet Talks to Herself,” Chrusciel explores her experience of writing in English rather than her native language. She says, “Writing in English is the work of smuggling metaphors from one language into another. It is a work of bilingualism and mistranslation, so it is a constant mental shifting and shuffling between the two languages, between these two different conceptualizations of the world. Writing in two languages creates bewilderment for us and for our readers. It changes us. It transports us to new places.”1 Her books reflect this truth as she truly has transported her readers to new places in her three previous books in English: Of Annunciations (Omnidawn, 2017), Contraband of Hoopoe (Omnidawn, 2014), and Strata (Emergency Press, 2009, reprinted by Omnidawn in 2018.) She has continued writing and publishing in Polish: Furkot (2001), Sopilki (2009), and Tobolek (2016) as well as translating White Fang by Jack London, The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad, and poems by Jorie Graham, Cole Swensen, and other American poets.This new book's title comes from the humorous and complex letter, “Delusions of Reference,” the penultimate piece before the Coda. In the letter to the poet, the Purple Gallinule explains that the “council of birds has met to discuss your identity” and that meeting has led to the discovery that she is related to the birds and that her last name signifies “the family of gallinule” (p. 91). The Purple Gallinule informs Ewa Chrusciel that she “ended up in the wrong climate and a heavy diet of cabbage, pierogi, potatoes, and cheese-cake” has resulted in her “anthropomorphization” (p. 91). In yet another transformation, the poet truly becomes avian, even as the “psychiatrist and poet become one” (p. 92).Indeed, transformation or conversion is a major motif in this textual montage. Midway through the collection, for example, Hildegard of Bingen, Benedictine nun and healer, and Sigewiza, a noblewoman in her care, undergo a similar conversion. Hildegard does drive out the demons in Sigewiza's mind, but then the nun herself falls ill and is “attacked by evil spirits” (p. 61). A list of characters in myths and folklore who change into birds in the final “Notes from the Mental Aviary – XXI” echoes this motif. Alcyon, in Ovid's Metamorphoses, transforms into a Kingfisher, for example, and in The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, a breeder of exotic birds becomes one himself. The poet concludes “birds are the mad earth's missionaries” because changing into birds allows for a “sudden halting” of “unbearable events” (p. 90).Chrusciel's new work expands on the themes and imagery of her previous collections, as Cole Swensen notes in her comments on how Contraband of Hoopoe (Omnidawn Press, October 2014) transforms boundaries: “Chrusciel makes ingenious use of birds to do this—the rukh, the hoopoe, and the hummingbird; the parrot, the partridge, and the bird of paradise. She uses the lines they inscribe on the sky to stitch together different ages, different spaces, and different dimensions, creating a marvelous convergence of the mythical and the remembered.”2 The hoopoe, a colorful bird with a crown of feathers, found in Africa, Asia, and Europe, was considered sacred in ancient Egypt and is found in all Persian cultures. “The bird of exile and return” and symbolic of the immigrant experience in the poet's previous work, returns when “A group of owls, herons, and hoopoes” storm through her “window” because “They want to found a literary group” (p. 52). Additionally, the “Bird Symposium” at the end of the book alludes to the hoopoe, a leader of all birds in the thirteenth-century Sufi masterpiece The Conference of the Birds by Attar of Nishapur and adds significance to Chrusciel's recurring themes.Readers with an interest in birds and/or in culturally constructed attitudes on mental health and illness will want to read this book, but the book is also intended for poets and writers. All ninety-two pages of the collection are linked as a long strand of pearls with no break or divisions in the text until the final pages, which are divided into four sections: Coda, Bird Symposium, Beaknotes (endnotes), and Feathery Thanks (acknowledgments). The repeating titles create a tapestry of thematic layers: sixteen “Tiny Throat Diagnoses,” twenty-one “Notes from the Mental Aviary” and three reflections on “A Poet and a Shrink.” The poet invites the reader to follow any of these threads that reveal meaning through ancient symbolism, historical and cultural stories, and the poet's own personal lyric poetry.Various untitled selections throughout serve both as poems and meditations, such as “A poem is a snowy owl. A vesper of dunes, a mystic of / plumage. Follow its curve” (p. 60). Although the poem and the owl are “polar opposites: whiter than snow,” they are both “streaked with black hieroglyphs, as if wings in flight” (p. 60). The “we” perhaps is the we of poets who must “unearth ourselves” or more broadly the “we” of humanity left with “unanswered prayers.” The snowy owl “glows on the shore” announcing a vision for the poet. On her “Feathery Thanks” page, she gives “Thanks to snowy owl . . . for announcing necessary visions” (p. 103). These tiny untitled poems suggest the visions the snowy owl helps to bring to the poet with subjects like mysticism, souls, hieroglyphs, gurus, and winged spirits.The personal memory poems like clips from a family album continue the themes of the book but add another dimension. In “Cupping,” which is both a memory of her mother and her own illness, she reveals her Polish heritage (the ritual of cupping is bańki in Polish). In the poem, the poet's body becomes geography with “colonies,” “volcanoes,” and “valleys.” With heated glass cups sucked to it to cure her pneumonia, her back is “bubbling in seismic shifts” while “a loon in distant waters / sings” (p. 20). So, with this memory poem, dominant themes and images of the work emerge—illness, diagnoses, treatments, birds, and her childhood in Poland.In another such poem, “Acts of Exile,” the poet's “80-year-old dad visits from his native country” and father and daughter seek balance amidst her belly dance class and her father's desire for eating chips, both forbidden by the Communist Regime in Poland (p. 31). Again, the poem suggests transforming identities when her father becomes her child. Though not placed together in the collection, what might be read as a companion piece to “Exile” is “And not to spill a single grain” in which sugar packets in her mother's hands “perch like fledglings” as her mother imagines them as “dollars” and each “grain of sugar” embodies a “trajectory of longing” (p. 66). Finally, in a poem “Of Aunt Anielka” (which she wrote in Polish), Chrusciel creates a kind of chant or a prayer with the repetition of the title that begins each stanza—“Of Aunt Anielka.” Her Polish aunt, who sleeps in her clothes from fear of having to flee from the Germans at night, may be the inspiration for the poet's deep understanding of birds. Aunt Anielka teaches the poet “how to kiss chicks / by passing [her] saliva / into their beaks” (p. 72).In a 2011 conversation with herself, Chrusciel says “The urge for meaning coexists dialectically with the resistance against completion. Nothing is ever complete in poetry.”3Yours, Purple Gallinule reflects that “resistance against completion.” This provocative and imaginative book is true to the poet's own words, meaning on the page opening like a surreal painting, door after door, portals to more questions and more visions. As if a way to resist its completion, The Coda is a Bird Symposium with a “Reception to follow. Swedish style buffet with a belly dancer” (p. 100).