If you don’t know Lillian Nećakov she is a humble but stellar poet out of Toronto. It is hard to explain her work because it slips out of convention and time and space and identity all in the space of one line. Even though I count myself blessed to be her friend, I have never attempted to write a review of any of her books because they seem impossible to corral in words. I could explain them for you, but it would not be enough. I honestly feel her full length il virus which came out in 2021 is every bit as good as any of Diane Seuss’ work. And again I am not saying that because I am her friend. Her latest chapbook of prose poems The World Is Beautiful from rob mclennan’s above/ground press out of Ontario, is vital, dark, and hopeful as well as technically brilliant. It breathes a risk and a spark and a music which does not politely take one’s head off, as Dickinson would say, but tears it off with gorgeous teeth.
The book begins with the title poem which thrusts us into her jazz-fingered esthetic instantly:Knowing that lungs {right 24 oz. left 21 oz.} are the colanders of time, cradling vestiges of scree from the mass of one breath {0.5-5 g} times a lifetime. Knowing that there are lakes drowning in the whimsical ether of a tourniquet-wielding junkie-planet, invisible and blue.Something that Nećakov does well is mix science and math and music into a pliable plasma to work within. She breaks what poetry is “supposed to be” constantly and reinvents. Her improvisational and wormhole burrowing skills are strong as any poet writing today, but this does not mean her poems do not have emotional depth and weight. Later in the same poem she stuns us with a perfect distillation of the current zeitgeist: “knowing that the executioner never takes his finger off the trigger, not even when the kiss is slower than death.”
Yet, her darkness is balanced with a radiant hope: “David Hockney says the world is beautiful. I believe him, because I am an optimist.” And she is as she gets her hands greasy in the mechanics of light and its absence: “Light built my house and filled it with poems about monkey wrenches and whales and songs that I sang to myself while slipping between the folds in the balmoral of night.” And in a later poem: “Life is a glass mouth budding with teeth called June, July and August, go home, climb the larynx of disbelief, you will find dopamine, there, just past the body bags.” She acts as an alchemist in the transmutation of the dense to the ether, and this is what, especially in our present state as a fractured world, we need.
The personas and identities she speaks through give her voice a powerful swath: Hockney, O’Keeffe, Lurie, Milosz, Neruda, Plath, Simic, Snyder, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Watts, Leary, del Toro, Ferlinghetti. One of the highlights is a fictional conversation on Alan Watts’ houseboat between the Beats and Leary which she admits in her notes “None of the people in the poem actually said any of those things, I made it all up.” In the poem:You have to dance, dance until your skull brakes, Snyder says. You have to drop America on its head, but quietly, before she makes a grave of us.
Ginsberg bows his head, there is a palace of holy smoke and that’s where I’m headed, a place where my bones will stretch into an opium bridge.
Drop your pants, say what hurts, Om Hare Rama Krishna Rama Hare Rama, break the skin, just a little with the morning’s light.
And Timothy Leary like a wrinkled forest of astronauts, a tired anti-god, black-eyed Susan, here I am, perched on the edge of his ejection seat.The LSD-soaked voices are palpable and believable and their breaking through the oppressive thought of the times is frankly very applicable to our present political climate. She also speaks Spanish through del Toro, who arrives “carrying an egg. Un caballero nunca llega con las manos vacias.” Hearing her channel O’Keeffe is a revelation:
I was a photograph once, stirring up the devil in a man twice my age. I walked a tightrope of lilac clouds in my tunic made of tanglehead, buffalo grass and mesquite the ladder held for twenty years until my name was “widow”, until the seasons made a stone of me, until he was nothing more than a wind jewel.I cannot think of a poet who blends danger, texture, synesthesia, and lightning in one expansive brush. She has her purposeful noise like a poetic Sonic Youth: “Call me marrow-orange, periosteum-yellow, fascia- blue, jack-in-the-pulpit, dreamwalker, Jimson weed.” She also has a softness and a highly tuned ear, as she listens to all the breakwater has to say: “Oh, the things you’ve seen, cloistered in the slope of a long light. Why I write to you with a chest-full of accidents. How you pull me out of harm’s way, time and time again.” Lillian Nećakov is quietly redefining contemporary poetry. Let’s hope her calls will be more widely heard.
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