Kudos to Senka Kovacevic for Where the Sun Reposes

by Rod Drown

Senka Kovacevic’s eight oft-elegiac poems of sorrow, insight and solace in Where the Sun Reposes (Tulip Press 2007) are memorable, not just for her strong images and elegant metaphors, but also for how she has linked a series of family photographs, featuring her father in the 1970’s, herself as a girl, and some other relatives, to each poem in the collection. What has resulted is an unusual correspondence in which the photographs serve as gently triggering introductions to the themes of each poem. The photographs obviously came first but, given their at times remarkably apt scenes in relation to the poems, one gets the impression that some 30 years ago a Higher Power was at work and saw, from that vantage point in eternity, that there would come in time a young woman deep in the Sorrow of Missing who would need such scenes to gently make her way through suffering and, in doing so, gain Wisdom. A sort of synchronicity has prevailed.

The first poem Midnight Insight well illustrates this correspondence between scene and opening theme when Kovacevic, on a page opposite one containing a photograph of her father bending downwards toward pigeons on a brick-laid European street, addresses her departed lover:

At first I feared you might love me
And scrambled for bricks to lay between us

All through the short collection, she uses this technique of employing the family photographs as a kind of key to the poem opposite. The sequence of photograph to text is always from left to right, always from a scene from a family’s heart chest of memories to its daughter’s sorrow and then her healing.

There are some beautiful and evocative photographs in this small hymnal to personal restoration, and they begin with a most remarkable cover –a black and white photograph in which, under the title’s words and the author’s name, three grandchildren of a toil-worn farmer are pictured gathered about him in truly classic fashion. On his right are two young and lovely sisters -- one stoic and looking to where her brother points and the other with a gaze coal black and sensual toward the camera; on his left, the grandson with raised hand and index finger pointing. Pointing to what? Perhaps to where the solutions to the sorrows and difficulties caused by remembered and sorrowed-for lovers are to found which is, in Kovacevic’s view:

…at the place where the sun reposes
all based in gold and clouds tinted of roses

Rest is needed. Heavenly rest – most likely to found in deep sleep with all its instructive dreaming. Or immersion in one’s contemplative depths where is also to be found the Heaven within us.

One of the strongest poems is Heavy Reverie which opens with the sensuous verse

I gorged on your mouth
Drank as much as I could out
But you were still overflowing
Looking up at you, your whole body was glowing

and moves through five four-line verses that deal with subsequent daylight doubts and vulnerabilities and their troubling intimations of soul-searing addiction to romantic connection.

I saw, in the photographs’ content and their sequence, some degree of a Jungian undercurrent. The sequence of photographs -- several of her father alone, one of him with a woman (Kovacevic’s mother?), two of a balladeer (again her father), one of a woman diving (to the depths?) and three of Kovacevic when she was about 10 or 12, and one of her father with one of his sisters -- implies that some archetypal realities are being presented. Some of the near-archetypes presented from her personal mythology have the healing qualities of fairy tales. These are finely shown in the last two poems The Forest of Forgetting and Wishing Well.

Forest is a nicely put narrative concerning the healing power of nature. Thirty-six intelligently and elegantly worded lines, detailing the unplanned and unexpected ways that healing happens, within nine elegant verses, many with internally echoing images and metaphors, lead the reader through the sequence that may begin with Serendipity:

When you walk in the Forest of Forgetting
You don’t know that’s the forest you chose

followed by the soul’s painful memories:

Tearing through your skin, the now growing distance you despise
As the gravel beneath you enters the wounds on your feet

but also by it’s Wisdom:

So take your time
Because the path you take, need not be a path at all

Wisdom, which, for me, seemed to culminate in the eighth verse:

So you must wait for those fateful collisions
That only happen when you have stopped waiting
Eventually your outline appears like a crystalline vision
Out of a mist that was once so saturating.

Wishing Well, with its nicely ambiguous, nicely dichotomous title is a magnificent little poem. It sums up its author’s imperfect and sorrowing human-ness – and her hopefulness. She has been cruelly wounded – yet she rises. She still feels disappointment, sadness and anger – yet she knows that the possibility of love must not be abandoned:

You are my wishing well
My most precious coins you have swallowed
Those hopes have sunk to the littered floor
My pockets are hollowed

When your currency is faith and trust
Your pocket is inside your chest
And when it’s empty, your eyes with tears are filled
Which spill into the well and increase the depth

And now there is a greater distance
To dive to reach those abandoned wishes
I only hope that I can hold my breath
Long enough to save those future kisses

This is a slender but immensely satisfying volume and can be ordered through Tulip Press at www.tulippress.ca

Kovacevic, as she mentions in her biographical notes at the back of the book, has had a number of significant athletic accomplishments including being the Canadian Gymnastic Champion in 1999, performing with the Cirque du Soleil at the APEC Presidential Gala, three times winning the Premier’s Award for Excellence in Sport and being one of the nominees for the YWCA Woman of Distinction Award in 20001. In 2006 she wrote and directed her first feature length film Gold Diggers. Now, continuing her exploration in the artistic realm, she is on her way to becoming one of the best of BC’s new poets.