Decomposed Reality

DECOMPOSED REALITY/published in The Chattahoochee Review/

Voice of Ice. Alta Ifland. Les Figues Press, 2007. 117 pp. $15.00.  

          Voice of Ice is an enthralling compilation of prose poems by Eastern European poet Alta Ifland. An experimental work documenting a fabled life built upon mutated dreams and amorphous manifestations, Ifland’s debut collection challenges its reader to question reality and consider an alternate, subconscious state of awareness. Voice of Ice creates a collage of distorted images, in which Ifland takes on a quest to extract reason out of the ostensibly absurd human existence, and as she penetrates her own psyche and strips away layers of accumulated ego, a tabula rasa emerges.

          In an effort to understand how words and language affect the constitution of an individual, the author composes her poems initially in French and then translates them into English. Originally from Eastern Europe, she foregoes the mother tongue and finds herself amid two new languages that disturb complacency and call her to engage in rediscovering and as she puts it, “renaming the world”. In this fashion, not unlike Samuel Beckett, the poet searches for an identity that is solely hers.

          Alta Ifland adeptly creates Voice of Ice as an enchanted vessel, in which she takes the reader on a surrealistic voyage from “Birth” to “Death”. The reiteration of images like eyes, bones, shadow, ice, and concepts like time, darkness, silence, soul amplifies the imminent realization of doom and temporality. Fragmentation is a technique used by Ifland, which generates bits and pieces that can be easily moved around. The author decomposes her body into essentials such as blood, tears and bone marrow only to give birth to a more pristine, purified creation, like the song of “a happy cadaver” in “Bones without a body”:

          My limbs are falling one by one. First one arm, then the other. My eyes are falling one by one. One eye, the other eye. My hair is falling bit by bit. From a distance, I watch my body shedding its leaves like a tree. …….And I’m dragging the bones the wind blows through, and my bones are singing like a happy cadaver.

          Morphing imagery plays a big role in the poet’s work. Real, recognizable objects construct dreamlike, incongruous landscapes. This strange combination of elements, for instance in the poem “Metallic Choir”: a “metallic spiral,” “church choir,” “waterfall curtain,” “swarm of bees,” and “white bones,” evokes a psychological response in the reader, both disquieting and haunting:

          At the end of the end of the world the end of a metallic spiral can be seen, coming from nowhere and stopping for no particular reason at this precise spot. If one pulls the end of the spiral, it triggers a sound like that of a child’s voice, singing on Sundays in a church choir. …..Their song, suspended for a moment in the air, and from there, coming back to earth, brings to mind a waterfall curtain. ….When the noise becomes unbearable, the children’s voices will themselves have become a swarm of bees attacking their fragile bodies, which they will gradually strip off their flesh, leaving only the white bones. …

          There is a perceptible softness about Ifland’s images that often disintegrate by spilling or dripping. The forms are phantom-like, elusive and unstable, as they easily morph into other unpredictable shapes. There is a striking resemblance between the eye Ifland illustrates in her “In the Night, a Dog” and the surrealist Salvador Dali’s painting The Eye. Both images appear soft and supple yielding to gravity “drop by drop into the unseeable.”

          An eye fills the whole night. A single eye, wide open. When it dilates, its edges extend beyond night’s boundaries, and then it falls drop by drop into the unseeable. …

          The poet dares to implicitly submit to life as it is. She chooses to dispose of her expectations, hopes, ambitions, judgments, and all the disappointment coming from them. A personal metamorphosis occurs and in the end, along with her acquiescence come humility and contentment. A good example of Ifland’s meekness is illustrated in “A louse”:

          I know I am but a louse lingering in corners and scrawling little louse stories meant to rot in the depths of the eye. … I lick the Masters’  boots and broken pots, and ask for forgiveness for being so little they can’t stop crushing me, and not a drop of blood falls when they do it. I am but a lame louse let loose.

          Voice of Ice is nothing short of an amazing literary work, both daring and mystical, with which Alta Ifland challenges the reader to engage in her quest for reason and resolution. This collection of orphic prose poems unlocks the gates to the boundless subconscious where abstraction becomes reality and verisimilitude loses its validity. The poet disputes the actuality of human scope and confronts primeval views and perceptions. It is an unconventional, distinctive piece of literature that undoubtedly deserves the public’s attention.