HCSHR 2:3: Luminita Suse, A Thousand Fireflies -- Mille lucioles

Luminita Suse, A Thousand Fireflies – Mille lucioles ; tanka. French translation, Mike Montreuil; introduction, Claudia Coutu Radmore. Ottawa: Éditions des petits nuages, 2012. ISBN 978-0-9869669-2-7. iv, 80 pages ; 13 x 18 cm.

sometimes
I let a candle flicker
all night long
my grandmother
always yearned for light

Luminita Suse has a knack for making me wonder whether she has read the same books I have.  In Wayson Choy’s first book, The Jade Peony, an uncle speaks of a poor Chinese boy who collected a hundred fireflies in a jar in order to study at night.  The young listener is disappointed that the fireflies did not serve a more fantastical purpose.  He would have enjoyed Luminita’s book, A Thousand Fireflies. In making me a gift of the book, Luminita wrote, “May thousands of fireflies bring light in your life always,” and they do.  The book does.  A nice thing about books is they’re for always, unless they are burned or destroyed somehow, and then the fireflies still live on.

Jane Reichhold, in Taking Tanka Home (AHA Books, 2010), includes a poem whose last lines read, “seems as if I am wearing/ the day wrong side out.”  As I read those lines I thought of Luminita’s poem in which she puts on her nightgown inside out “to join the scarred moon.”

Though there are several poems about fireflies in this collection, there are also lots about stars, meteors and meteoric rock.  My favorite:

stars strewn all over
as if a child went
head over heels
startling fireflies
into vastness

The “as if” and the abstract vastness are not regularly used in haiku (cf. Reichhold’s poem cited above!), but we excuse Luminita because she is the exception.  After writing this review, I looked at my newsfeed and read about a possible meteor striking the moon during the blood moon eclipse in January 2019.  It was recorded as a flash of light on the dark red moonface.  Who did I think of?  And shopping in a snowstorm the next day, I recalled the Zhivago-esque tones in her modern-day: "lost the cellphone/ somewhere in snow/ his voice/ calls my name/ [ . . . ]"

It’s hard to choose any single poem from this or any of Luminita’s beautiful books produced by her great friend in Ottawa, Mike Montreuil.  A Thousand Fireflies contains Mike’s French translations, less than literal, with a note that the book includes a subtext of Romanian, the original language of some of the poems.  The book ought to be used in ESL (English as second language) throughout Québec and francophone Ontario.  It could be used almost anywhere in the world to teach French.  To comment on the translation, let’s take this example:

snowstorm
we recall the cold
of past springs
and this winter
so long between us

How to translate the ambiguity of that last line?  Mike does it effectively with: “si long cet hiver/ qui vient entre nous.’’  Adding the idea of “comes between us” instead of the cozier “between us,” Mike successfully brings in the lingering sense of “so long” (farewell) hinted in the original.

Despite her experience as immigrant from Romania and her training in sciences, Luminita has a child-like freshness, both in voice and subject.  The book begins with hot-air balloons like her thoughts that don’t stop at traffic lights, and muses over a child who sees putting one’s feet into the sky as an equal or better possibility than placing them on the ground.  Not that her work lacks gravity.  She describes her poems (in a poem) as periscopes looking for meaning and beauty.  She writes palpitatingly of love, so lit with it she sees it on the dark side of the moon, and writes in “steamy gerunds” (so she says, though her use of gerunds is thankfully sparse).  Love has many sides and objects and outcomes, sometimes “the perfect wound:”

cloud gauze
dresses the bleeding
horizon

Still, peace and a yearning for the end of conflict lie deep in these poems.  A photo of her grandparents sets off resonances of flutes and bones, broken but humming in the grand-daughter safe in another country.  The blink of an eye takes on enormities:

raindrops
cling to a bare branch
I blink and some vanish
I blink again
new ones appear

(Did she read Pound ?)  Luminita is a fascinator, never sure of herself or the world around her. There is faith in colour, her road “a gray ribbon/ descending/ from a lapis sky.”  In the grey ([sic], p. 36) she also sees complexities of right and wrong, hinting at transgressions, for example, in the steamy eye-glasses forming a ménage à quatre.  Colours rage:  “flowing amber…/ in autumn’s lingerie/ maples ignite insanely.”  A photographer’s eye has picked out these images, and Luminita’s photographs are as sharp, like an intaken breath, as her poems (as these ferns). 

If you follow up Fireflies with the tanka exchange between Mike Montreuil and Luminita, A Hint of Light (petits nuages, 2013), you get a picture of a writer wrapped and trapped in her humanity; risky, thrilling and resigned.

Review by Sandra Stephenson