Please meet the prolific and multidimensional poet, Rose Mary Boehm. She has graciously consented to an interview. I will give you her official bio first, but you’ll discover in her interview replies that there is so much more to Rose and her poetry than what can be discovered in a paragraph.
German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and ‘Tangents’, a full-length poetry collection published in the UK in 2010/2011, her work has been widely published in US poetry journals (online and print). She was three times winner of the now defunct Goodreads monthly competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart and Best of Net. Her other poetry collections are: ‘From the Ruhr to Somewhere Near Dresden 1939-1949: A Child’s Journey’; ‘Peru Blues or Lady Gaga Won’t Be Back’; ‘The Rain Girl’; ‘Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders?’; ‘Whistling in the Dark’; ‘Saudade’, and ‘Life Stuff’. A new chapbook is about to be published by Kelsay Books. Find out more about the author and her work on her website: https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/
INTERVIEW OF ROSE MARY BOEHM
I first met Rose in the Verse Virtual poetry community and journal. The journal itself is part of a community of poets that are very supportive of each other.
At the end of the interview I won’t respond because I want to leave you with how Rose ends the interview. Thank you, Rose.
- I have a theory that the creative chronology of a poet is more important than the physical chronology; however, the poet is first shaped in childhood experience. Your book From the Ruhr to Somewhere Near Dresden 1939 to 1949: A Child’s Journey, is a witness to those years, but years that were intensely defined by being a German child living in Germany during WWII. The book describes the deprivation of a war fought elsewhere and on the homeland. Please share a poem from the book and tell us what you hope the book accomplishes.
Having been a young child during WWII in Germany (I had just turned seven when the War ended) will forever colour everything I do and think and feel. I have a kind of PTSD which is well controlled (even though I just cannot, CANNOT read stories and see photos of the children of Gaza without despairing completely), but I can’t help referring back to my childhood again and again in many poems.
Now that I am in the last years of my life, I am desperate that my children and their children should not experience war, and this seems increasingly unlikely, the way the wind is blowing all over the world. It makes me scared and sad.
The book, From the Ruhr to Somewhere Near Dresden 1939 to 1949: A Child’s Journey, was a bit of an exorcism, a talk with a therapist perhaps, and hopefully a message to all children who lived either this war or any other. And, if they survive, how they often find (a somewhat troubled) childhood, remember the finer points of a caterpillar rather than the next plane strafing the house, the next bomb killing your neighbours, your parents, or you… if you’ve been small enough not to understand it all. My brother, eight years older, was not so lucky.
The collection is more of a story told in free verse than individual poems, numbered only in the order of telling the story. Seen totally from the child’s point of view, told in the child’s voice. Whatever I remember I remembered in this way – once I started looking.
I think I have to use two poems to give you an idea of the contrasts (‘normal’ childhood versus little-understood horror):
Poem 5
Mother calls them ‘Christmas trees’. My brother calls them flares.
I am wrapped in a blanket, sitting on Mother’s arm.
We are on the balcony. It is nighttime. Danger time.
These ‘Christmas trees’ stay for a while, suspended in the night sky.
Now she runs with me down to the shelter. Moments later
there is the whizz, the rumble. I press my hands to my ears.
In the shelter I always lie on the sofa and trace the pattern
of the velvet cover. Maybe that man with the hoarse, loud voice
comes in these explosions and sweeps through the house,
killing everything with his breath. Black. He wears black
and he has a cape, like on the posters.
The siren won’t sound the ‘all clear’ tonight—that long, long howl
which tells us it’s alright to go back upstairs.
As during thunderstorms, the bangs come closer.
My brother looks as white as a ghost
and holds me tight. Mother comes to my other side
and holds us both. Suddenly the candles die.
Screams.
Silence.
Confusion.
Everyone speaks at once.
‘Where are the matches–must have been next door.
The Brandt’s… Must have been the Brandt’s.’
A light appears from the other side
and a figure in white. It’s Herr Brandt holding a candle.
I can’t help giggling. He’s wearing long, worn-out underpants.
Many houses are still burning.
Burning flesh stinks,
burning rubber stinks.
Death stinks.
Poem 6
I stand on the balcony. On tiptoes.
I’ll see him any minute now. The tram has
turned the corner, and it’s the tram
on which Father usually comes.
It’s a sunny afternoon
and I feel expectant and happy.
I can see his trench-coated figure,
recognize the way he walks, the way
he wears his hat. He carries his leather case
and something wrapped in paper. He probably
bought two of those flat fish with yellow spots
because it’s Friday. We always eat fish on Friday.
I am never quite sure whether it’s Friday
because he brings the fish, or whether
he brings the fish because it’s Friday.
- From your poems that I have read and those I have had the pleasure of hearing you read aloud, I have taken away that you have lived through a variety of changes: lovers and husbands, having children, living in various countries, learning many languages. How do you think your “multiple lives” and languages enrich your poetry? It might help if you have a couple of quotes from your poems to illustrate your points.
Yes, Luanne, it’s been a rich and varied life, full of pain, miracles, adventures, more pain, and much, much love. There is no way I can not weave this into my poetry. What am I saying, I am weaving nothing: it ‘weaves’ me. Those memories want out, and most of the time they become poems.
I chose the following poem as an illustration where my travels did not produce ‘place poems’ but a deeply-felt incorporation of history, place, and DNA.
A Pilgrimage
In Rosh HaNicra I look across
to Lebanon. Below me is the sea.
I pick up a stone and let it bounce
against the rocks.
The Sea of Galilee cuts me
with contrition. I want to atone
for sins to which I feel fettered
by blood. The Jordan washes the dusty crust
of the Negev from my skin.
The Dead Sea lifts my burden.
Haifa receives me in a language
I understand, Bethlehem’s brittle
alliances don’t inspire. My friend rejects
the kipah and holds my hand.
And Yom Rishon is the first day.
The languages are an enrichment and sometimes a small-ish problem: with each language you learn so much more than words. You internalise different cultures, customs, religions (or interpretations of it), images, music, rhythms. That’s definitely enriching. What can make you stumble at times are words you know in one language, you can feel what they mean in its totality in your belly, but there is no way they can be directly translated into their complete components in one English word. You have to ‘write around’ that word in order to make its full, round meaning understood in the way you do.
Of course, my travels, my pains, my children have all been sources for poems in many iterations. But instead of a few quotes, I think I’d better use the title poem of my collection ‘Saudade’, a poem that is the perfect example of ‘writing around’ the meaning (as perceive by me) of the word ‘saudade’ which means so many things in Portuguese:
What is Saudade?
A moment that passes like
a paler shade of Spring,
like the knowledge of a certainty,
the vague promise of repeat.
The echo of something
which never was, a butterfly wing
that may have brushed your cheek.
Dreaming of indolence.
Expecting the first rains on dry fields,
not quite hearing the last lark before
the autumn winds, the first smell of snow,
the never-ending final summer dance.
Softest touch of his hand on yours,
the death of an infatuation.
Your evanescent youth.
A strange bliss in your longing,
fear of fulfilment. Praying
for the becalmed sea of inertia.
Celebration of absence.
You carry a sharp, merciless
switchblade made of stainless grief.
- If you had to leave quickly and could only take two of your books, which would they be and why? I’m not asking which you think are the technically best collections, but the ones closest to your heart now. Do you think your feelings about any of your poems has changed over the years?
Oh my, that’s the ‘impossible’ question. Each one of my books represents an important part of me, and I can’t leave even one important part of me behind. I’d rather think that I would be allowed to grab’em all. It’s a ‘Sophie’s Choice’, if I may use such a heartrenting example for mere books (but they are my children too, in a way).
If hard-pressed, tortured, threatened with a bucket of maggots, I’d probably choose ‘The Rain Girl’ and ‘Saudade’. Still, just writing this hurts. I also need ‘Life Stuff’. But please, let us keep that very much between us.
- Rose, what brought you to Peru and what is your creative life like there? What does Peru add to your poetry?
I was brought to Peru by my Peruvian husband, Luis (a Luis is affectionately known as ‘Lucho’ in Peru). I met Lucho in Madrid, where I had moved to from London, licking my wounds from a previous marriage that hadn’t made it. By the time Lucho and I got together, I was quite ‘together’ again too, or this new love adventure wouldn’t have worked. Take it from Granny: never marry on the rebound!
We stayed in Madrid for 18 years, and then took the plunge. We have now been in Lima for almost 14 years.
Peru was the first time where I lived (not just visited) a completely different planet, new language (even though I was fluent in Spanish – it’s a different Spanish here), poverty, llamas, braids, hats, Andean music, the gentlest of people as well as cheap lives easily taken over a cell phone. My book ‘Peru Blues’ was the result. I couldn’t write it now, I had to write it while I still saw everything with ‘foreign’ eyes. Over the years Peru became home, no longer an unknown country, and many things one no longer ‘sees’.
For example:
At the Seaside in Peru
Houses made from basket weave lean
into the dunes of the desert only a few meters
from the salty dance of the Pacific,
shivering in the stiff breeze.
Sand mixed with plastic and excrement,
small children crawl atop the landfill
with burlap sacks, the odd pig snuffles
between shards and pieces of iron.
A half-dead plant wrenched from the root,
reminder of what once was — unsalvageable.
Here I am, holding a small, brown hand,
sticky and bruised. Her large dark eyes
are those of a cornered deer.
Her mother turns to leave.
Contrasts
I remember lipstick smears on empty wine glasses, kisses
blown into the air, muak, muak, how good to see you,
Dahhling. There were important decisions
to be made. Go for Dior or Cacharel, and the wonder
how some women would never lose that dark-red
which ringed their mouths and made them appear
like fathomless caves, dangerous suction channels
inhaling man and mammal into Dante’s Inferno,
and the whispers behind long-nailed hands, ready
to claw and destroy, freckled breasts arching out
of low-cut silks and cashmeres, gold weighing
on bony hands. ‘Can’t be too rich or too thin,
Honey,’ that’s what the Duchess said. And now
I am watching from afar, on the screens of lies
which used to be the ‘small’ screens, how mudslides
reclaim the riverbed. The poorest build their precarious
homes there every year against all advice and the offer
of other land. My grandfather, some say, my mother, say others.
Tradition meets ignorance, and they tearfully watch again
their houses, children, wives and husbands
disappear under boulders and mud.
- Please describe your current project and why it is important to you. Why is it important to readers?
One of my current projects is a chapbook called, ‘The Matter of Words’, that’ll be coming out in the autumn of this year. I LOVE words, and – as I did with ‘Saudade’ – have written poems (short ones and longer ones) around ‘difficult’ words, words that are not used in daily speech as a matter of course.
But there is a full-length manuscript that is now looking for a home. That one – I won’t mention the title or give an example poem, not to discourage potential publishers, you know how iffy they often are about ‘previously’ published or curated – is a collection of all my favourite poems written since the publication of my other books, or those that didn’t quite fit. This may well become another one I’ll sneak into my backpack when I have to leave a lot behind.
And that’s where we are, that backpack. I am 87, and where I am going in the not too distant future I won’t need a backpack, and I can only hope that my writing will not completely disappear but give some meaning, joy (or tears) to those I leave behind.
It took me eighteen years from the first story I wrote about my father’s workshop in our basement until publication for Scrap: Salvaging a Family. Some of that time was “down time,” including from the day ELJ Editions accepted the manuscript until it was actually published. So in the meantime I was writing other things, usually poetry, but some micro or flash fiction, too.
