Valzhyna Mort. Factory of Tears

World Literature Today, May-June, 2009 by Svetlana Tomic

Valzhyna Mort. Factory of Tears. Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, Franz Wright, and the author, trs. Port Townsend, Washington. Copper Canyon. 2008. viii 116 pages. $15. ISBN 978-1-55659274-4

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In a recently published anthology, New European Poets (2008), twenty-seven-year-old Valzhyna Mort from Belarus set herself apart from many other young poets. Recipient of the 2005 Crystal of Vilenica Award in Slovenia and of the 2008 Burda Poetry Prize in Germany, she is most characterized by an obstinate resistance and rebellion against the devaluation of life, which forces her to multiply intelligent questions, impressive thoughts, and alluring metaphors, while her rhythm surprisingly arises as a powerful tool for the most dramatic moments of her verses.

Factory of Tears is her second book of poetry and the first one to be published in the United States. (It is also the first American bilingual edition in Belarusian.) As an immigrant from a dramatically changed homeland, Mort is concerned with some of Belarus's political issues--a new national identity and a new language. As she goes about presenting these issues, a range of conflicting feelings emerge ("Belarusian I," "Belarusian II"). In the poem "The Factory of Tears," she brilliantly converts the ideological speech of a famous socialist factory's reports into personal confessions that culminate in bitter irony. In other poems, Mort intensifies her connection to the past through the figure of her grandmother, who survived the Stalinist age and became the author's heroic muse.

Since her move to the States, Mort has begun dealing with another new language (one of her poems is written in English) and more new places. The poem "New York" begins with a sort of a theatrical announcement: "new york, madame, / is a monument to a city / it is / TA-DA // a gigantic pike, / whose scales / bristled up stunned," followed by verse expressing her own fascination and enchantment, and ends with wizardry--comparing skyscrapers with a rabbit pulled out by its ears from a black hat by a magician. The poem "From Florida Beaches" reads as a metaphorical postcard: "The sun is jumping among the clouds like a yellow monkey ... The beach pours like an overturned jar of honey / and waves lick the shore with their watery mouths."

Readers will enjoy the mature way in which Mort communicates the ironies and paradoxes of life and her specific bond with music, "but time will come and it will / show its tara ta ta." She has a deft ear for rhyme and a great sense of rhythm. Even in her most narrative and longest poem ("White Trash") the poetic speech is easily and smoothly transformed into different forms and structures. In her shortest poems ("Fall in Tampa," "Promised Land," "Teacher") she masters the art of saying much with a few effective details: "your body is so white / that it falls on me like snow / every night is a winter."

Factory of Tears is certainly worth reading. Moreover, readers will appreciate the talent of Valzhyna Mort, acclaimed as one of the best young poets in the world today.

Svetlana Tomic

Bethesda, Maryland