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Mária Ferenčuhová

Photo of Maria Ferencuhova ON MÁRIA FERENČUHOVÁ



Mária Ferenčuhová is in terms of her publishing history a wholly twenty-first century poet and this is true of her style, procedures and subject matter. She writes relatively slowly compared with some of her contemporaries considering that Slovak poetry collections are relatively slim volumes, much less than1,000 lines in length. Slovak critics have characterized Mária’s work as being related to the ANesthetic generation and the Text generation of Nora Ružičková and Katarína Kucbelová whose neutral tone and use of abstract terms is in contrast to the post-Tender revolutionary passions where an older generation of Slovak poets were able to release work energized by the Beats. Mária’s work resists the pressure emerging from a still potent male-centred critical attitude to women poets in Slovakia which has confined them to a role where they wrote brief lyrics on intimate themes, nature or composed poetry for children. Despite the work of a number of strong, older women poets, for example Mila Haugová (born 1942), Anna Ondrejková (born 1954), Dana Podracká (born1954) and Viera Prokešová(1957-2008), this expectation of a feminine as opposed to a feminist still poses a barrier to the reception of poetry by women in Slovakia so that poems whose energy and content is directed outside or beyond this patriarchal undercurrent often catch critics off guard.

The poet and critic, Ján Gavura, has coined the phrase “okokameramanky”(Camerawoman’s eye), referring to her work as a lecturer on film.This is slightly misleading for Anglophone readers for whom Isherwood’s “I am a camera” belongs to another era of realism in writing. Mária is not a realist in that sense at all. Certainly there is an ability to switch visual perspectives in the space of a single poem, to zoom in and out. In Threatened Species the sequence opens with a view from space, “The view from above doesn’t belong to a god / but a satellite”, but by section 10 we have a microscopic viewpoint, “we examine the skin on faces / maps of blood vessels, craters for cells.” There is also a merging of the self with the environment; human beings in Mária’s poems are also animals and not separated from the environment. Often in her poetry the body becomes both exterior and interior landscape, a juxtaposition of macroscopic and microscopic vision akin to the hermetic doctrine of “as above,so below.”
I read Mária’s poetry with same excitement that I first read the English Metaphysicals many years ago.


No Text TIDAL EVENTS

Simply they’ve come out of the woods.
The whole herd slowly
setting out for the city,
Their hooves knocking
on the tarmac:
cars pull over,
they pour from the roads.

Roebuck and doe
have headed to the houses,
kneeling in front of gates,
folding their bodies on lawns,
pavements, roadway
and crossroads.
They bleat monotonously,
yet turn their heads away,
if someone wants to stroke them.





Every day
the new and new kind
lose their shyness.
They approach us,
look us in the eye,
lead us to the sea.

Without fear
together we stop to breathe.



No Text

METEOR


We prepared a terrible death for you.
We left you to brawl with wild beasts.
We thought you were one of them.
We let you parry fangs with milk teeth,
claws with the shells of your soft fingernails.

Our prolongation,
pink thread
tangled up in life
a ball of hair, tendons
and pliable bones.

In the middle of man-made
rain forest in need of water three times a day
so it won’t alter in the wilderness,
from what it’s been up to now.

A calm unobtrusive moment
of entanglements. A leap to silence
only millions of cicadas
rhythming.

The last reflections of a six-year old:
Who cuts off the sun,
even when it’s burning,
who never gets tired
pushing it over our heads?
Who drifts meteors
across the sky?

Is the world so, as I see it?
Am I really
who I think I
was?





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