Ocean Avenue by Malena Mörling

Ocean Avenue
by Malena Mörling
New Issues Press
(1999)

Ocean Avenue was selected by Philip Levine for the 1998 New Issues Poetry Prize, an annual award given for a first collection of poetry by New Issues Press (Western Michigan University). Over the past few decades, Levine has developed a reputation for selecting excellent books by emerging women authors for a variety of book contests: Roberta Spear's Silks, a National Poetry Series selection (Holt, 1980); Dorianne Laux's Awake, a New Poets of America Series selection (BOA Editions, Ltd., 1990); Jane Mead's The Lord and the General Din of the World, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize (Sarabande Books, 1995). These 3 titles are uncommonly excellent, and Mörling's Ocean Avenue fits nicely onto this list of Levine-championed books.

Malena Mörling was born in Stockholm in 1965 and raised in southern Sweden. Like her countryman Tomas Tranströmer (undoubtedly an enormous influence), Mörling's poems ferry back and forth between the physical and the mystical, often leaping into the surreal. The voice in Mörling's work is in ecstatic awe of every aspect of quotidian life--cows in a field, bus drivers, train passengers, pigeons, subways. At every turn she surprises by finding the universe in a grain of sand. Here are a few representative pieces:



THE DARK DRINKS THE INSIDES OF MIRRORS


As the day sinks into pockets
and into the bedside water glasses
of the sick,
I think of every gesture,
every word I uttered
and thought of uttering
in doorways and elevators,
in the long living room of the train.
And of every drop of bird blood on the pavement
below the immaculately polished windows.
We are skeletons
with nothing on
except a thin suit of skin
to keep the liquids inside
from pouring out like thought--
as when the body is crushed
in a car accident
or when it is cut open
by the toothed disc of a circular saw
in the finale of a magic show.
The blood arcing
out of the slender body on the table
and the magician turning to the audience
smiling and inviting them up on stage
to examine the intestines.
I was on a bus with wings,
I saw the beggar
sprint across the square
with both crutches under one arm.
I saw the bald child
weep into his rusty pail.
I was on a beach so bright
I could not think.



STANDING ON THE EARTH AMONG THE COWS


When I was driving through Wyoming
past fields of just-overturned earth
black in the noon sun
and past thousands of cows
totally at home in the open,
I stopped the car to stop moving
and got out to stand among them
and I said nothing in English or Swedish.
Now I want to be whoever I was in that moment
when I discovered my own breathing
among the cows' breathing in the field
and studied their satin bellies
and udders slowly filling with milk.
I was not separate from anything living, I was
equally there and there was nothing to wait for.



VISITING


In the shape of a human body
I am visiting the earth;
the trees visit
in the shape of trees.
Standing between the onions
and the dandelions
near the ailanthus and the bus stop,
I don't live more thoroughly
inside the mucilage of my own skull
than outside of it
and not more behind my eyes
than in what I can see with them.
I inhale whatever air
the grates breathe in the street.
My arms and legs still work,
I can run if I have to
or sit motionless purposefully
until I am here and I am not here
the way death is present
in things that are alive
like salsa music
and the shrill laughter of the bride
as she leaves the wedding
or the bald child playing jacks
outside the wigshop.



Perhaps the most striking poem in this collection is the dreamy, 6-part title piece, "Ocean Avenue." Too long to reprint here, this poem exemplifies Mörling's ability to follow her imagination wherever it takes her. Despite the poem's length, she sustains an ecstatic, philosophical tone. Luckily for us, Mörling has published a second book, Astoria (Pitt Poetry Series, 2006). Both books are easy to find in inexpensive paperback editions on abebooks. New copies, of course, should be ordered from your local independant bookseller. The hardcover edition of Ocean Avenue, shown here, weighs in at around 40 dollars.

New Issues Poetry and Prose was founded by the poet Herbert Scott (1931-2006). The Olives of Oblivion would like to give Mr. Scott a 21-olive salute for his vision and dedication to the art of poetry and publishing.



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