Great poetry is always about more than oneself, even if its gaze seems insular at first. The world’s conflicts and their repercussions, from within one’s home to the international stage, are constant, as is the world’s beauty – poetry often enters the spaces between. In Ilona Martonfi’s The Tempest, truths are uncovered, revealing tendrils and roots that reach far outside one life. Martonfi’s astute and unpredictable poetry forges into painful histories and adamant renewals, laying bare an unsettling narrative that should be mandatory reading. 

somehow we smuggled out 

the common secret of violence 

distorting that unreality 

 

I will go now, go 

grey the colour of hope. 

The Tempest
Ilona Martonfi

Inanna Publications
$18.95
paper
100pp
9781771339063

“I’m sorry,” you say, 

choose ugliness 

see the grey streets 

and bombed-out houses 

mirrored in chalk hills 

unfold the reed grasses 

the narrow spaces between. 

Recurring dreams in which 

your mother and you sit in a cellar 

to unremember 

summer flowers crying 

shot in black and white. 

Amid all these moments and memories endures art, the desire for freedom of artistic expression and the balm of poetry, as a writer and a reader. A seemingly strange choice and mysterious way to make sense of anything, but poetry’s an art that works, excavating the world to reveal what it’s really made of. 

I hear a small blackwater stream 

quarrelling with metaphor. 

Wetness the shape of water on skin. 

The bodies we speak of inhabiting.