Review by Prof. Leonard Trawick, Cleveland State University, in Raft, A Journal of Armenian Poetry and Criticism,
1998-1999.
Coleridge once proposed a method by which even an uninspired author "might write an interesting book--let him relate the
events of his own life with honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them…" Having experienced in my recent
reading a surfeit of miserable childhoods, painful divorces, and lovable grandmothers, I did not find promising the note on the
back of Helene Pilibosian's volume of new and selected poems…But I hasten to add that, as I read, my fears gave way to
interest and pleasure. The honesty and personal detail are here, but so also, in many of the poems, are a distinctive voice
and a fresh and surprising way of looking at ordinary things, which transform the raw materials of a life into poetry.
In "House of Toys," which provides the book's title, we see Pilibosian at her most interesting. The poem opens:
I crank
the old phonograph
in a dream,
the song of Caruso
having slowed.
The past is such a show,
a dream with a window
to open and close,
screened, cleaned.
Here dream takes on some of the substantiality of the historical past; at least it contains a physical record of a
transitory past event, Caruso's singing--though the past has to be renewed by a conscious act, rewinding the phonograph.
Conversely, the past is like a dream--but a dream to which access, as through a window, is at least partly under one's control.
The poem continues with a fragmented meditation on time, dreams, children growing up, and present experience.
Section II ends,
The clock strikes
upon the hour
of a life that is
wound for measure.
Her cranking the old phonograph is transmuted into winding the clock of one's life. In the third and final section, the
first two of the three stanzas begin, "It is quarter past ten," and "it is quarter past/the dream…." The third stanza
concludes the poem:
It is quarter past
reality and
crickets of an August
that hugs us
are chirping.
There is auditory and tactile immediacy in the chirping crickets and the "August/that hugs us." But this vivid present is
thrown into a new perspective by the illogical "quarter past reality." The crickets' chirping suggests the ticking of a clock
and perhaps the squawking of an old Caruso record. The three stanzas of this last section give us clock time
("quarter past ten"), dream time ("quarter past the dream"), and reality time--but what is that? Reality includes
crickets and hot Augusts, but also memories and dreams. It is left to our imaginations to explore the possibilities of
these overlapping realities; such enforced freedom and the stimulation provided by the suggestive images make this
a memorable poem and an epitome of what is best in the whole collection.
At Quarter Past Reality is divided into four sections. The first is the most miscellaneous, dealing with questions of poetic perception or epiphanic moments such as "After Staring at an Owl." The second section deals mostly with children, including the poet's own. The third (and longest) deals with the poet's Armenian roots and family; and the fourth (and shortest) consists of an additional nostalgic Armenian poem plus a long tribute to a physician who saved the poet's life. The last two sections present material that is probably of more interest to family and friends than to the general reader, though they provide vivid glimpses of Armenian-American life half a century ago, with all of the tensions that double nationality entails. Section III contains some memorable portraits, such as the shadowy grandmother whom the poet knows only through a photograph but whose presence she sees in her father; and "The Anti-Rebel," a determined "Mr. Ordinary" who would
…not see the hyphen
in American-Armenian
(or should it be
Armenian-American?).
The subject matter of Section II has more universal appeal, though poems about mothers and children always present the danger of sentimentality. At her best, Pilibosian avoids this danger by the novel slant she puts on her perceptions. In "Blue Mother," for example, the mother
thumbs through a book
and through her children's looks,
settles in a study chair
after sand and mud
have returned to their places
and clicks on the light
she ladles there
after the tousled ones
have drawn a picture
of sleep.
The cozy domesticity almost becomes cloying, but the unexpected verb 'ladles' and the notion of drawing a picture of sleep bring down the saccharine count to a manageable level. (Incidentally, I do not know why this mother is 'blue.')
One of my favorite poems in the book is also one of the simplest. "A Plain Green" conveys a woman's delight in a dress that somehow brings out the best in her, suggesting mysterious depths beneath a cool exterior:
It was the
green dress that
made me look
thin as a mountain stream.
It was a cool
color but not cold.
Cold is meant
for the heartless…
The dress
was the smile
that no one believed,
beguiled some as
worship does
(or is supposed to).
There was no pattern.
It was a silent green.
It implied the rule of summer,
the warmth that
followed me.
It implied that
what might have been
was.
Like many of the other poems, it also exemplifies Coleridge's prescription for success by conveying emotions with clarity and truth. And when a real poet does this, what may have seemed plain--like the green dress--becomes beautiful and mysterious.
From Writer's Digest, August 1999
The reader of At a Quarter Past Reality: New and Selected Poems is
quickly drawn in by the quiet, lyrical whispers of Helene Pilibosian's
poems. Each tender, haunting echo invites us to settle in and sample the
precise, measured tones of a world in which everyday occurrences tell us
who we are.
Pilibosian's poems are a study in human behavior with small scenes
carefully delineated in well-crafted understatement. Each poem examines a
particular moment, revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary.
As the book's title suggests, to read her poetry is to look into her mirror
and see beyond the reflection of Reality.
Poetry judge Charles Ghigna is a poet, children's author and nationally
syndicated feature writer. His book See the Yak Yak (Random House) is a
Book-of-the-Month Club fall main selection.
Review -- Margaret DiCanio in Nor Or, Dec. 3, 1998
Poet Helene Pilibosian has just published At Quarter Past Reality: New and Selected Poems. Some of the
poems have won awards. "Asking for a Proverb" won the Pteranodon Award and "Roots and Leaves" won the
Wind Literary Journal Award. Pilibosian had committed to poetry after Nelson Antrim Crawford, editor and
publisher of Author and Journalist accepted her poem "Sunless Sky," and told her that another of her poems
reminded him of an expressionist painting. For several years, she was an editor at The Armenian Mirror-Spectator,
a weekly with a national circulation, based in Watertown, Massachusetts.
Recently Pilibosian studied poetry at Harvard with well-known Cambridge poet Gail Mazur, who has taught at several
colleges and is now at Emerson. She learned from Mazur how to drop the barriers of shyness and say what she
wanted to say.
In 1983, with a manuscript of poems in hand, she decided to bypass the wrenching experience of trying to get a
publisher. With her husband, Hagop Sarkissian, she started a publishing company, Ohan Press. She writes the
books and he does the technical work of designing them and dealing with the printer.
Her first book of poems was Carvings from an Heirloom. "Distribution is the most difficult part of bringing a book
to the public's attention," she said.
As a direct result of becoming a publisher, "I got over my fear of public speaking so I could do readings, too.
It was very difficult for me because I've always been a very shy person."
The second book was published in 1992. When her father died in 1989, he left a brief memoir in Armenian and English.
Pilibosian built the rest of the story around the English section. She expanded the story based on memories of her father.
"He had a great storytelling ability and I remembered his stories." The book's title is They Called Me Mustafa:
Memoir of an Immigrant. Mustafa is the name her father was called by Muslims during the Genocide.
Ohan Press's next book, From Kessab to Watertown: A Modern Saga came in 1996. It was a translation of the
memoirs of her husband's father. Sarkissian added a substantial amount of information about the history and geography
of Alkexandretta, a controversial area between Syria and Turkey, where his father lived. He also added photographs and
a genealogy of the family.
The most recent book, At Quarter Past Reality, is largely autobiographical and covers a span of decades.
Narrative poems
chronicle five generations of her family as well as more general themes.
A poem called "Years of Glass" that shares the immigrant experience begins:
They'd left the farms
ancient Hittites had spaded,
left Armenian trees
with fruit as sweet as moons
in the esthetics of the tides.
Necessity had goaded them.
and as the poem draws to a close:
The table stood like praise
for their hands and psyches,
strong with varnish
of equality for workers
and on it there was a dish
made of American glass.
They were paid in the currency
of contentment for that work.
Pilibosian's study with Gail Mazur enabled her to finally write "Matters of Survival" about her near-death experience in 1963 and dedicate it to the late Dwight Harken, M.D., the brilliant physician who saved her life. A few lines from the end of this poem that end the book are as follows:
Overnight I became the poem
I had always wanted to write.
Then when the blue of the Charles River
wafted around his boat,
my shyness gazed, afraid to wave,
as his eyes threw a meaning
I thought was an anchor.
Sentence spilled,
became a river,
a new self to sail upon,
filtered by a mystic's discovery.
I wrung drops of joy
out of the rag of world
I had not believed in,
wiping away the rust of depression.
I sent him the awareness
like paragraphs in an envelope,
the equation that was my self
in sentences falling out of thought
as if by his indication.
Where is he now,
in the portrait that hangs
at Mt. Auburn Hospital,
in the blue of the sky
so like the color of his eyes,
in the reflected images
that cross my paths,
in the biographies I've discovered,
in all the books he penned
about all I'd never know?
The above interview is reprinted in the recent book Memory Fragments from the Armenian Genocide: A Mosaic of a Shared Heritage in which there are thirty interviews with Armenian-Americans of accomplishment. Published by iUniverse, it is available at amazon.com and bn.com.