{"id":5591,"date":"2011-05-26T06:30:57","date_gmt":"2011-05-25T18:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=5591"},"modified":"2011-05-25T21:55:26","modified_gmt":"2011-05-25T09:55:26","slug":"nancy-mattson-lisis-letters-from-karelia-cardinal-points-literary-journal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2011\/05\/26\/nancy-mattson-lisis-letters-from-karelia-cardinal-points-literary-journal\/","title":{"rendered":"Nancy Mattson: “Lisi’s Letters from Karelia”, Cardinal Points Literary Journal"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Nancy Mattson<\/p><\/div>\n

Last year, when I was editor on the Tuesday Poem Hub<\/a>,<\/strong> I featured\u00a0 a work titled Compasses: A Triptych<\/strong><\/em><\/a> by Nancy Mattson<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Compasses: A Triptych<\/em><\/strong> forms part of Nancy’s forthcoming collection Finns and Amazons<\/strong><\/em>, Arrowhead Press.<\/strong><\/a> Finns and Amazons <\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em>is a collection that celebrates early 20th century Russian women artists, such as Varvara Stepanova (the subject of Compasses<\/strong><\/em>), who were featured in the exhibition Amazons of the Avant-Garde,<\/a> eds. Bowlt & Drutt, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1999.<\/strong> Many of these women towered above their age in artistic terms, but much of\u00a0their work\u00a0was lost, buried or overlooked until the 1990s.<\/p>\n

The other woman who informs Finns and Amazons is Nancy’s (Great) Aunt Lisi who first emigrated from Finland to North America and later to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s; she was lost in 1939. A sequence of poems in the\u00a0 Finns and Amazons collection is based on letters written by Lisi to her sister Anna, who remained in Canada. Four of these poems, together with excerpts from the letters, have just been published in the current issue of Cardinal Points<\/a>, a New York-based literary journal of\u00a0 Russian-focused literature. To give you a taste, here is an excerpt from the first poem:<\/p>\n

Letter from Somewhere, 1932<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In the unmapped centre of the uncut forest
\nbefore we came somewhere from Uhtua
\nhappy workers hustled up the first buildings
\nin the fourth year of a five-year plan
\ntime moves so fast whatever our purposes
\nrestaurant sauna laundry-hut bakery shop
\nwarehouse stables office red corner to hang
\nfaces of leaders posters photographs banners
\ncharts to drill this alphabet into our wooden heads
\nprepare us to work for the common good
\nas our leaders so often remind us but
\nour plans our wishes our feet go dragging …<\/span><\/p>\n

(c) Nancy Mattson<\/span><\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

To read the full feature, including Nancy’s introduction, please click here.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year, when I was editor on the Tuesday Poem Hub, I featured\u00a0 a work titled Compasses: A Triptych by Nancy Mattson. Compasses: A Triptych forms part of Nancy’s forthcoming collection Finns and Amazons, Arrowhead Press. Finns and Amazons is a collection that celebrates early 20th century Russian women artists, such as Varvara Stepanova (the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-writers","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5591"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5622,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5591\/revisions\/5622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}