(Houdini in Karis)

I went to the basement on the afternoon of the
nineteenth of August and made a carpet from
galvanised three-inch nails and ice-green shards of
bottles I had thrown on the stone floor.
The audience roars when on the carpet I slowly stretch out
my wonderful back.
I can break out of all the strongboxes there have ever been.
I walk with light steps in my star-strewn slippers.
Everyone asks about my age and that the wounds don’t bleed.
I give no interviews and think in the morning
and the evening when I fall asleep about one thing. That one goes
up to someone and means something. That one will stay.
I wanted to change my life! Sometimes I think
I glimpse a beloved figure at the bus stop,
like a movement only, there was often someone else in a
dark blue jacket and yet we vanish in the glitter.

This week marks a return to the work of the Finnish-Swedish poet, Tua Forsström, whose previous collection, I Studied Once at a Wonderful Faculty, provided a Poem of the week a couple years ago.

Her new collection, One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake (translated by David McDuff), is a sequence that may be read as one silence-punctuated extended poem. Water, fishes, stars, glitter, dust, rain, wolves, hares: these are among the leitmotifs, and have literal and metaphorical resonance. The natural world intersects at every turn with the moral world, and is intrinsic to Forsström’s love poems and elegies. There are human characters, of course: an operatic Carmen; a “Girl in Yellow Boots”; someone called Vanessa; and, in this week’s poem, the escape artist Harry Houdini.

Forsström puts titles in brackets, to suggest minimal interference with the flow from poem to poem – or between poem and silence. (Houdini in Karis) forges its own distinctive, vaudeville-tinged sphere. There is, at the same time, a Finnish setting, and a sensibility closely related to that of the whole sequence. It’s not – or not exactly – a dramatic monologue. Houdini’s tender, cleanly articulated voice seems no less the poet’s own.

The act being prepared in the faintly sleazy and ominous “basement” is not the kind the real Houdini is celebrated for. Yet to lie prostrate, yogi-like, on nails and broken glass requires self-mastery all the same – not unlike other physical actions in the sequence: rowing, swimming, driving in winter. Houdini describes his prowess with a kind of rueful pride, but at greater length exposes his vulnerability. He is an escape artist who longs for human connection.

The opening lines advertise the modernist technique by some jittery breaks on “of the” and “of”. (There are, as far as I can judge, equivalent jolts in the original Swedish version, too.) By contrast, a strong gravitational pull is exerted by the hard, simple adjective-noun couplings: “galvanised three-inch nails”, “ice-green shards”, “stone floor”. A specific date at the start of line two offers another kind of anchorage.

Rhythmically, the poem contorts and then straightens itself in lines 5 and 6: “The audience roars when on the carpet I slowly stretch out / my wonderful back.” One line, aided by unusual syntax, is elegantly extended, while the other is truncated, but together they are comfortably poised, and take the narrative into a present tense. For those two lines, we are in the dramatic moment as Houdini composes himself on the carpet of shards.

Offstage, he continues to meditate on his invincibility. “I can break out of all the strongboxes there have ever been. / I walk with light steps in my star-strewn slippers.” Again, consecutive lines are differently weighted. Houdini first seems concealed in tough-talking assertion, and then immediately reappears, light and floaty as a dancer in his “star-strewn slippers”.

The syntax twists strangely again in lines 10 to 12. There’s an ambiguity, beginning with the “one thing” Houdini thinks about in its relation to “that one”. It appears that the “one thing” and the person meant by “that one” are separate entities. The opacity clears if “think” continues to be the governing verb for each statement beginning “that one”.

Forsström’s endnote tells us that the line “That one goes / up to someone and means something” is “freely” drawn from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Seeking reassurance from an element less familiar to him than chains and strongboxes, Houdini seems to dream of a more than linguistic meaning in the contact between two people. He seems to be musing on a lost possibility of meaningful permanence.

The irony of “I wanted to change my life!” is underlined by the exclamation mark. Freedom and wealth may now be haunted by regret for the evanescent “beloved figure”. Specific details offset the loss, with possible sightings at a “bus stop” and the memory that “there was often someone else in a / dark blue jacket”. The glitter in which the paired figures vanish is reflected in the imagery of a poem further on: “And the water glitters and everything glitters and / happens for the first time again.” So the magician and his ghostly helper or lover disappear in an illusion of closure at the end of the act. Houdini’s interest in the afterlife may be relevant. He had a second career exposing trickster mediums, but he fully intended to make contact with his own widow after his death.

Whether or not Houdini performed in the Finnish town of Karis on the 19th of August one year, it is intriguing that his soliloquy here fuses so well with the timbre of the sequence. It suggests a deep imaginative link between the poet and her avatar.

The collection One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake is about many things, not least courage in the face of age and death. It ends with these beautiful lines:

The next chapter is called: before we forget
the next chapter is called: the darkness
the rain the kindness
It is already October and blowing hard
I must drive firewood home
I must turn the key in the lock
And then I hear again that voice,
mysterious and clear
You are old now little child
don’t be afraid little hare