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Reviews of Olga’s Dreams

Western Morning News

Tuesday 4th January 2005

Poetry publisher puts originality to the fore

Simon Parker

... The third in the series is Olga’s Dreams by Victoria Field of Truro. Winner of the prestigious bloc online writing prize at the 2004 Falmouth Festival of Literature and Arts, she has been widely published and works throughout Cornwall as a poetry therapist. The collection is extraordinarily sensual, spanning the world from Cornwall to Siberia, taking in Afghanistan and the Mediterranean along the way. Her subjects vary from food and love-making to death and Cornish apples. Remarkably visual, Victoria Field’s voice is both distinctive and alluring....

Poetry London

Summer 2005

Beginning in delight, ending in wisdom

Henry Shukman

... while the production values of Victoria Field’s Olga’s Dreams (fal Publications) are strikingly unusual - from the strawberry-pink fly-leaf to the decorative borders on the prelims, from the stiff glossy paper to the jumbo format. On top of that Field gives us a two-page introduction about the place of poetry in her life (I found myself wondering whether I wanted to hear that these were songs [she] would wish to sing again’ before I’d read a word of the poetry; though if she herself likes them, there’s presumably a chance we will too). All of which makes the typical metropolitan volume look decidedly austere and tight-lipped....

Victoria Field used to work for the British Council in Russia, Turkey and Pakistan. Her poems roam the globe: some recount thrilling sexual adventures in these exotic locales. And there’s one intriguing piece about the eruption of the volcano Mont Pelêe on Martinique in 1903) which buried St Pierre, the ‘Paris of the West Indies’, in about ten minutes flat, killing everyone - so the story goes -except for the one condemned man in his thick stone prison cell).

Many go back to her native Cornwall, however, and my favourite, deep in the heart of the book, is ‘Going Back’, about revisiting a childhood home many years on. It’s something we can all relate to. There’s strength of feeling, clarity of statement, honesty, no attempt to dress things up as more than they are: ‘The pampas grass my parents had begun now wild and tall.’

A lot of the poems have good subjects and are well handled except for odd moments of carelessness. It’s probably pedantic of me not to be able to overlook them, but lines like, ‘The dark night / sinks into inky sea’ (from ‘Summer Solstice’) distract me. What manner of object is night that it can sink? Isn’t the sea subject to night anyway? Or does ‘night’ mean ‘sky’? But then how can the sky move downwards? Well, in a sense it always does, at least the western sky, what with the earth’s rotation. So is it the stars (of night) that sink into the sea? It’s unhelpful to have to ponder all this. Or: ‘The whole house is soft with sleep — / deep beneath waves of feathers 1/ the people sink into slumber’ (sinking again). I know that sensation of softness in a house (it’s in ‘Early’, an otherwise lovely poem about being up before anyone else, including the pets) but that adjective ‘whole’ immediately invites me to think of a house’s bricks, tiles, plaster, plumbing — things that can never be soft, no matter the hour. And the waves of feathers? Presumably she means eiderdowns going up and down with breathing. But waves move along as they go up and down, and a wave of feathers is anyway a more or less unimaginable image. And how ‘deep’ is a person beneath a bedcover? It’s a shame to leave the reader pondering these illogicalities when they could be paying attention to the cat and dog who, beautifully, sleep on and ‘stay far away, here but there, vaguely aware / of love, like breath, invading their dreams.’

Likewise in ‘Jumping’, an otherwise excellent poem on sexual pleasure, we suddenly hit upon, as a depiction of erotic intensity: ‘my toes recite Shakespeare / on the top of Everest, backwards’. I’ve read about the magician of Lublin who could shell peas with his toes, but toes that could talk? Again it’s frustrating, because the latter part of the poem is so good: ‘and I ask you, Shall I? / and you answer, Yes.’ Simple, delicious.

HQ Magazine - The Haiku Quarterly Numbers 31 & 32

August – December 2005

Reviews:

Michael Paul Hogan

... From the confines of Norwich to the world at large, and Victoria Field’s first full collection Olga ‘s Dreams. Moscow, Lahore, Peshawar... even Mersea (Essex) is given a chilly, Russian makeover, and it cannot be a coincidence that the geese overhead are Siberian. I suspect that Miss Field would rather like to be Anna Akhmatova, but in fact comes closer to the Elizabeth Bishop of Brazil and Elsewhere - not, I hasten to add, a criticism; fine poets, both. What she is, in fact, is a very accomplished, always interesting, poet - good enough to be good enough as herself.

There is a moment when you are deep within me
and I am balanced on that exquisite pearl
when my world becomes boundless my skin sounds like it sparkles
my breath is a thousand shades of blue.

Notwithstanding the artistic pull of the East, the majority of Victoria Field’s poems are domestic in setting: she makes her home in Cornwall, another interesting analogy with E.B. whose American homes were Nova Scotia and Key West — on the edge rather than within. Despite some infelicities (‘The Secret Language of Women’ is labored and, at three pages, far too long) there are many delights. I just wish I had the space to quote the whole of ‘Register of Arrivals and Sailings No.22’ which would be a highlight in anybody’s book. Instead, because it is good and (as we shall see later) appropriate, I will close this review with her poem ‘Zennor’.

St Sennara trapped
the mermaid
in his small, grey church

She’s now as silent as the hardest wood of the old, dark pew

eternally looking
in her mirror for gulls
for boats, for pink, for blue

longing for her own hair as it once was
at one with the waves.

Poetry Express

Autumn 2005 / Issue 22

Reviews, Reviews, Reviews...

Reviewed by Roy Holland

This is the third volume in the new FaI Publications series, following on from Bill Mycock and D.M.Thomas. Victoria Field will be well known to our readers as the former Director of Survivors’ Poetry, one of the first people to qualify in Poetry Therapy in the USA, and the current Chair of our sister organisation, Lapidus. Some of the poems also reflect her time with the British Council in Russia, Turkey and Pakistan.

In the introduction Victoria follows Pushkin, saying ‘...many of my own poems describe experiences of sadness and I have derived real satisfaction from working and reworking them into songs I would wish to sing again’. Thus there is a feeling of nostalgia in the first section entitled ‘Another Life, A Distant Shore’. Victoria preserves the memories of her travels: ‘My violator, my warm wind! taunts me/ with gardens and marmalade./ He makes me beg for it/ for Saharas/ Siberias

The dream sequence ‘Sergei Kuriokhin wasn’t my Lover’ is full of sensuality, while stereotypical Russian melancholy is avoided. Victoria visits Akhmatova’s flat and an Afghan market in Peshawar. There’s a wonderful satire on ‘Purdah’, ending: ‘To save us all, let’s keep men hidden/ so women’s lust can’t rise unbidden’. She visualises the volcano erupting on Martinique through the dedicatee, Bertha, who is ‘on the damp moors, in the dusty attics’: ‘Hot lava descended, warping trombones/ and twisting church bells into witching sticks’.

The second sequence, Sex, Death and Eggs’, begins with a night out which the poet imagines Sexton and Sylvia Plath: ‘Sometimes you stand either side of my bed, whispering/ offering to save me from weight/ tempting me with death’. The clever angels convince the poet that the man she takes home is ‘a toy suitable for women of loveliness’. This is feminist poetry at its best. On the ‘Unconscious Bus’, Victoria declaims ‘Picasso, Christ, Clinton and Jon Snow/ sit where you should, please/ offer your seat when! male archetypes get on ...

On her father’s death when she was a child, her mother ‘made sounds! like a hen all night long’. Her tidying and sorting is described as ‘chicken-scratching’, and she sends the young Victoria to buy eggs; en route she meets her grandmother ‘gnarled with grief’.. ..‘like an old black hen’. It seems to be a matriarchal family. The landscape is also female. In ‘Tides’, ‘Rivers, iron-dense and dark/ link womb and sea’. ‘The Secret Language of Women’ is almost hermetic, though there’s a glossary of the acronyms used. In ‘Drought’ menstrual blood is compared to ‘A hundred red/ rose petals (falling)/ through her belly but the petals fall ‘on the/ stones and dust there/ where jewelled fish! once swam to a yellow moon.’

Victoria has acclimatised to Cornwall, where she now lives. I remember her reading the wonderful poem, ‘The Heart’s Orchard’, using the names of Cornish apple varieties, at a Lapidus meeting, and there are several ‘Cornish’ poems in this book. Perhaps the best is ‘Dark Angel - On hearing that the chough is returning to Cornwall. It starts: ‘She wears red tights and her lips are blood/ Her legs are scaly and she has shiny black tits’. At night the poet becomes ‘sticky with chough’. Victoria also identifies with the Celtic west: ‘My hands float away from me/ to Cornwall, Bardsey, Avalon’.

Victoria’s work is rich with literary and artistic allusions. ‘Wasteland - for Vivienne Eliot’ takes a daring approach: ‘It worked well for this man / to have a wasteland to which/ to send his unwanted woman’. She writes several poems after Lorca, including in the third section of the book, ‘Here, Now’, ‘Romance of the Moon’, transferred to Cornwall. Local traditions and folklore are equally prominent. There is a very funny poem about the cat which was paid ‘to keep mice, rats and pigeons from chewing the ropes’ of the medieval clock in Exeter Cathedral. ‘Register of Arrivals and Sailings No 22 —Held in the library of the National Maritime Museum, Falmouth’ uses a list technique reminiscent of Frances Horovitz. ‘Zennor’ speaks of the mermaid, ‘now as silent / as the hard wood! of the old, dark pew’.

The volume ends with ‘Words - after Anne Sexton’ where ‘{words} ... .Trap my blood/ to make black poppies on snow - / they love me, they love me not,’ and an ‘Invocation’ where she prays ‘Keep me from seeking simply/ the light Take me into! the dreamtime, the half-light,’; and finally ‘Keep me from certainties.’

This book really is a splendid first collection with its combination of local colour, feminism and mysticism. Do order a copy.

Raw Edge Magazine
Number 21
Autumn-Winter 2005/ 2006

Reviews

Roz Goddard

‘Olga’s Dreams’ is a beautifully produced collection from FaI Publications, a specialist poetry publisher based in Falmouth. This is the kind of book you wish was ‘scratch and sniff’. It is an extraordinarily sensuous collection and reflects the author’s interest and experience of travel and engagement with place. It is as if we have come across a drawer full of someone else’s holiday photographs, not the naff ones with half a head missing; these are lively, rich, inviting and sexy.

Here’s a taste:

You are patient enough to spend hours adoring my ankles/ and you talk of eternity worshipping, in turn, each one of my moles

Or in ‘Pomegranate Juice’:

Pakistan was as unexpected/
As the iron-rich redness/ of the glass I was given at breakfast—

I enjoyed the music in Field’s poems, gaining pleasure from repeating lines to myself, discovering how they stay put and bear repetition.

Acumen Literary Journal

Number 57

January 2007

CORNISH BLUES

JOHN O’DONOGHUE

(Olga’s Dreams reviewed with Dear Shadows by DM Thomas)

Here are two poets with mutual interests in Russia, in the erotic, and in Cornwall, where they both live. If they share a poetics over and above commonplaces of contemporary poetry - travel, ‘love’, home – it lies not in the lines on their pages but in what lies between the lines.

Victoria Field’s ‘Wind Man’ visualises a male muse at once real and imagined:

Bright angels vanished
as he moistened my lips
with gin and warm milk
quickened the waves on the sea
tied my ankles to the moon.

Throughout her book such images of the angelic and the erotic are counterpoised. They are there in ‘Ash Wednesday’, which sings of hunger and thirst, of “needs that are / deeper than oceans...” there also in ‘Forget-me-nots’, a little posy of flowers, for “you who never were / an neither come nor go”; most definitely there in ‘Jumping’: “my is an altar with candles / my thighs are struck by lightning / my breasts are continents”, which ends in an apocalypse of “exquisite pearl”, arms. and kissing, and tears.

Lest we should think Field some latterday Juan de la Cruz or John Donne, a poet for whom love is divine but contact always human, she also has a vision perhaps denied these earlier poets. I speak here of Russia, a country whose liberation, though by no means complete, at least for her provides a ‘weather’ the English are usually denied:

Was it madness, I ask myself to be taken in by
the way small clouds sped across the matt blue Moscow sky...

the loud surprise of you, a world suddenly all in shades of blue?
(‘Storm, Moscow’)

If here I reduce a poem almost as vast as Mother Russia herself to, say, the size of Georgia, the reader will perhaps be aware of how adept at Field is. That loose, looping couplet is sustained over eighteen whirlwind gusts of pure poetic power to arrive, not this time at a person, but at a view of Moscow the storm — and God knows Russia has weathered many such storms lately — reveals “in shades of blue”.

Don Thomas too writes of the power of Russia ...

... It is in their mutual love of Cornwall, however, where one sees this impressive pair - one making their debut, one enjoying a renascence - really rising in descant over and above muted English tones to toast the air with clarity and light:

It’s a small world I want now
just an oval lawn and hollyhocks
no horizons beyond the well-swept floor
the garden wall and the blue front door...

warmth of a kitchen, simple wine
the eucharist of wet grass beneath
my morning feet and all creation
in the sudden bloom of a single lily

The earth can turn, wars begin
and Romes burn but leave me here
in these kind rooms
and let the priests and angels come. (‘Temenos’)

What lies between the lines of these two Cornish poets are the cracks where light breaks in.

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