Sky Variations / Márta Júlia Nagy: Promised Girl, Jelenkor Kiadó, Budapest, 2021. / PRAE.HU
Márta Júlia Nagy Promised girl collection of sky variations: ‘window itself is the sky’ (10), ‘wounded sky’ (17), ‘reverse sky’ (18), ‘the sky is torn in two’ (41), 49), ‘on the mirror’ (51), ‘wrinkled sky’ (54), ‘baby soap blue sky’ (71), ‘under the bloody sweat of the sky’ (77), ‘dirty spring sky’ (80), ‘the tires on the sky ”(81), this surrounds and outlines the world of the volume. This world is painful, grotesque, falling apart, aging, nascent, clean and obscure, constantly evolving still life
It is usually large compared to a volume of poetry, which on the one hand can give space for the full unfoldment of its world, and on the other hand it can destroy its coherence due to its overstretching. It consists of five cycles in which the poems are not thematically typified, in each cycle mythological Moira (10), Persephone on the Birch Palace Road (37), Gaia (76), the Bible Martha, Mary, Lazarus (23), Mary’s Song to Martha (49), Bethlehem in Alsórákos (60), The Resurrection of Lazarus (91), and fairy tales Cinderella on Fogarasi Road (56), Sleeping Rose Leaf for Shadows in Rainy Weather (110) parallels, transcripts, symbols.
The very subtly elaborate metaphors, the often overwritten, almost kitschy structures, “the treasure of drought / Blue Forest Steam, heat bubble” (18), give the impression that they have no function other than their sound. But there is no doubt that these decorated images can be exciting, creating their own worlds of poetry, “In a dreamy desert, in the middle of their foreheads.” (9), so perhaps its length is what drives the reader into the fabulous Art Nouveau world of the volume by the end.
One of the central motifs of the structure is biblical evocation, the story of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. The biblical brothers are perhaps best known for the resurrection of the boy, yet Martha the Great evokes them along a different story. The first cycle Martha, Mary, Lazarus In his poem entitled, he experiences the personality of the two women in the modern age, and is now independent of all sacredness. The verse evokes the story of Bethany, only in a “concrete desert” without Jesus (23) – this is reinforced by the phonetic harmony. In the form of Martha, she experiences hospitality and service, “She is not used to eating in front of others, / She loves eating her stew”. Mary, on the other hand, is the attentive student in the story who, instead of satisfying her instincts, turns to the higher truths: “Mary does not eat, she just loves.” (24). In the poem, we observe a modern-day scene from Martha’s point of view, where an incomprehension of love is unbearable in the middle of a concrete desert, where she tries to convince herself of its invalidity due to a complete lack of love.
The closing lines of the poem lead on to the Mary’s song to Martha to the poem entitled. In this verse we read the testimony of Mary. The language of the poem resonates with the rest of the volume, through fine images, meticulous still life descriptions. In this text, Mary misses the joy of a fraternal relationship, the beauty of the world, in a word, all that actually illustrates the insurmountable contrast between the two of them. The Apocryphal experiment The poem entitled, as the title implies, is an attempt to give some explanation for Martha’s alienation. In the poem, from the perspective of another biblical figure, Peter, a thread of love comes to life that protrudes from the composition of the volume. The last piece of the story is The resurrection of Lazarus poem. The act of resurrection in this environment does not affect people, but creates the illusion of the passage of time, “Ladies and gentlemen, elsewhere it is January.” (92) Analytical observation of the change of seasons separates the three brothers from the actual resurrection and exit from the concrete desert. The biblical story that appears in the volume is an exciting play presenting the female perspective, the insoluble contradictions, and the life of a modern man unable to get out of stagnation.
The title poem, The promised girl it simultaneously embodies the feminist narrative of the volume: the female life path, the phases of the female body, and the connection to nature. Traditional female roles and spaces emerge from which it is impossible to break out, but the possibility of a way out still arises at times. The closing line of the poem, “What Never Was” (63), opens up another play in the volume.
Four more can be attached to the title poem, a I never need you, the You never need it, a We never need it and the You never have to. The recurring motif in these is violence, exploitation, rejection and repression. The androgynous narrator’s voice does not allow for the independence of gender roles, the poems play with the images: “homeless reptiles crawled across the bed” (58). The four verses are linked not only in title but also through recurring symbols such as the raspberry or the “King of Silence”. These texts rewrite each other, run in parallel, and in each of them the girl somehow becomes and remains a proper girl, as the word suggests: the promise is irreversible, the one promised surrenders to the external coercion.
The volume and exciting possibilities of cohesion appear in several points in the volume of Julia the Great: the rewritten history of biblical figures, through the intertwining of female roles and destinies. Mythological and fairy-tale poems, however, somehow cannot fully blend into cohesion, which is reinforced by linguistic overwork. This volume creates a very rich world of poetry and symbols. Even if we get lost somewhere in this world, the skies can be handrails.