Sher Poetry

If you like, sit back, relax, and enjoy a reading of this Poetry Book Review. I used an online pronunciation site for the non-English words. Click below for audio.

                                    Braided Threads Sing

                                                 by

                                        Sher Schwartz

A Nest in the Heart

by Vivienne Popperl

The Poetry Box, 2022 

pp. 81 $16.00

A Nest in the Heart

Vivienne Popperl’s first full-length poetry collection A Nest in the Heart seeks to answer a question: “Where is [her] body’s landscape. . . where does [her] physical body belong in the natural, geographical world?” Is it in Eastern Europe where her Jewish ancestors originated, South Africa where Popperl was born and raised, or in Oregon in North America where she relocated in 1981? Can all three places be inside the nest she carries within her heart? The poems as a whole give us the answer.

Popperl touches Eastern Europe through her ancestral body. In “To Those Who Came Before Me” she can taste “pickled herring, / chopped liver with hard-boiled egg, / kichlach, and kreplach.” She can “smell mothballs, lavender, pipe tobacco.” She knows her parents, grandparents, and great grandparents are all “stowed away snug within.” Still, she asks, will “you who came before me, you who are within me / will you accept my gift”? Will you accept this story I tell of our family and my place in it?  

Popperl’s poems have the extraordinary quality of bringing family members of the past to life through a sparse narrative style, where each word and image is carefully chosen. For example, when she relates how her aunt saves the family silver from a Russian soldier after the Revolution in “Winter 1919, Lithuania”:

         [I] tap my feet, click my heels

         to mask the faint clack of silver knives, forks, spoons,

         two candle sticks wrapped in a soft white cloth

         snug inside my mother’s bloomers

         . . .

         I burst into song

         we sing in the sun as we plough the black earth

         I clap, yodel

         the soldier joins in, conducts… 

Yet, beneath this frivolity lurks the terrors and tensions of war:

         he throws the cigarette butt on the rug

         we watch a black hole slowly widen

         he stares at each of us

         purses his lips

         spits

         walks out

The family’s wealth is saved, and like all the poems in Popperl’s collection, each weaves another thread into this finely-made family nest. 

We encounter “Early Spring 1913” in Lithuania, and we learn about another type of saving. In this poem, Popperl’s mother is saved from the Angel of Death by an ancient Hebrew naming ritual. Thereafter, Popperl’s mother “always chose life “regardless of life’s suffering and all the [difficulties].” She would say, “it’s still a beautiful world.” Popperl’s mother found her “calling” to be a medical doctor, and she graduated medical school in 1939, a time when few women could become doctors. In “The Art of Medicine,” the reader sees a woman who combines the science of medicine with an intuitive wisdom of healing: “she listened for the unseen / read the signs and sounds / above and beneath the skin.” Popperl’s mother Mathilda practiced medicine into her 70s, but she was also an artist. The ekphrastic poem “Deschutes River Dream” presents an imaginary vision of Popperl’s elderly mother standing beside the river, painting the same scene found in the painting hanging in Popperl’s home in Portland, Oregon.  This is one of many examples throughout the collection of time-shifts and layered threads of reality existing in the same poem. 

Again, the reader is struck by the connected nature of these poems crossing space and time in “Conversing with My Mother’s Father in the Afterworld.” The speaker tells her long-dead grandfather about the foods and places in her Oregon home since she relocated from South Africa, while he relates visions of the “old country” where “snow is falling” and the “trudge” of “heavy black boots” presses the landscape. He tells her of “honor. . . security. . . hard work [and] gentleness.” Part of his telling reveals his love for South Africa, such a different place from his original home in Eastern Europe. And he tells the poet, “twenty years growing corn / on the flat dusty African plain / were the happiest of his life.” Is her grandfather a ghost? No, not in the conventional sense. Instead the poet conjures the resilience, history, and place of an ancestor who has left home and threaded a new life, which is like Popperl’s migration from her birth home in South Africa to Oregon, a place of “green. . . puddles. . .[and] rain.”  

In the poem “Descendants,” Popperl conducts another imaginary time travel visitation with her grandfather on her father’s side and tries to heal the past. Her grandfather Avram took his own life. The poet speaks to him before his death trying to help him change his mind: “Avram. . . Don’t be ashamed of your life. It is not a failure.” Inspired by the poet Ocean Vuong, Popperl uses an interesting poetic form that he innovates in “Seventh Circle of Earth” a poem written entirely in footnotes. Above Popperl’s footnotes the reader sees an empty page symbolizing what Avram leaves behind if he takes his own life––six children, a wife, years of pain, and a chasm of blank space. Popperl hopes to be helpful to future generations by showing that it’s important not to hide mental illness, and in the case of her own family, she wants to acknowledge depression and its sometimes-tragic consequences. 

Popperl’s childhood is also covered in this collection in the final section of the book.  She grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa, where her understanding of apartheid grew slowly, as “Summer 1957” relates:

         in the yard of a child

         a screen of sweet-peas

         protects the princess

         behind curling tendrils

         ready to snap closed

         on the wrist of any intruder. . . 

Apartheid in 1960 was in full swing. All the white families in Johannesburg had servants. In “Black and White in Johannesburg,” Popperl recalls the quiet time  spent with Emma her beloved nanny: 

         we sit on the threshold of her room 

         stretch our bare legs

         . . .

         my pink, chubby feet

         level with her soft brown knees…

Emma’s little boy is the same age as the girl in the poem who is Popperl as a child. The boy is being raised by Emma’s mother away from Popperl’s home. The little girl, Popperl, realizes Emma spends all her time with Popperl’s family. Emma seldom sees her own child. This thread also places itself in the nest of Popperl’s heart as she sees her Jewish family’s participation in the same sort of discrimination her grandparents left behind in Eastern Europe. It becomes one of those “broken threads” in the nest.

A Nest in the Heart is riveting storytelling in verse, and Popperl’s collection of poems have left me to ponder my own family’s legacy in the hillbilly country of West Virginia. I think about decisions made by both of my parents and grandparents and how those choices influenced later generations and changed people’s lives. Although this collection is a highly personal and intimate gift from Popperl to her family, traversing three continents and connecting with multiple generations is a satisfying reading experience. All readers can appreciate being immersed in these poems as they braid and sing their way into our hearts.