Review of In the Morning we are Glass by Andra Schwarz

Translated by Caroline Wilcox Reul
Reviewed by Will Reger

Borders can be dangerous places. Unstable, conflict-prone, subject to armed attack and defense. Borders are crossed to flee trouble or to find peace. They can be synonymous with identity and authority and so define nationalism of the more virulent sort. Andra Schwarz’s book of poems explores the intimacy of borders on multiple levels. She calls her poems Reisegedichte, or travel poems, to suggest movement or journey along pathways that cross from one space to another. In her poems she moves between dark and light, forest and meadow/bog, the world of Germany against the tiny corner of the Sorbian (aka Wends) lands, between wilderness and farmland, and city and country.

She herself is not Sorbian or Wendish, but living there means she crossed a very real cultural border. Because the Sorbian language is of the Slavic family, she crossed a linguistic border. These are borders between the spaces of her own life, which she explores in her poetry. Not quite a “stranger in a strange land,” she is an outsider who must accommodate herself to the world she occupies, acknowledge its character, perhaps even come to love it.

She writes as an “estranged familiar,” crossing a border, but never truly capable of becoming native to the new space. The Nazis sought so assiduously to eliminate the Sorbian culture they left behind mere scraps of their existence. What remains for Schwarz is the landscape (including Slavic toponyms), mostly agricultural with some wildness folded in, which again reflects the dual spaces divided by borders, the framework of her poetry.

The concept of border obliges her to explore the spaces on either side. The dimensions of those spaces are many. Shadow: “shadow-blinded” mirrors, “shadow temples,” coal mines, deep pits, and graves (terms that seem to refer to ancient burial structures, cairns, barrows, that gave many ancient Slavic cultures their names), the dark forest, the ruined villages with the coal “scraped” out. Light: open lands, meadows, “furrowed” land, tidelands, and emptiness, the empty place being the “wasteland between the legs.” And everywhere is distant, the horizon “never sinks.”

Connections are described with images such as spider web strands, wires, fibers in fabric, roads, and pathways into forests or through dried bogs and woodlands, roads out of the city. Connections often fail in this borderland where she sits. Gravel roads and footpaths peter out and leave one lost. Objectives exist in these connections: the tree line, the horizon, stelae, temples, the “border stone of night,” and even simply bed, but the failure to connect can be iconically powerful, almost supernatural. Even Vishnu himself “is nowhere to be found.”

I felt an immediate intimate connection with these poems. When I was a child, my parents moved from one state to another. During my teenage years, I experienced being an “estranged familiar” in that new place. I felt the border crossed had somehow misplaced me. My life was divided by that state line into two qualities: the place of light we left for a place of darkness. For better or worse, that border has been woven into my own writing. Eventually, I wrote academically as a historian of the crossing of borders in the past. Crossing a border is one of the most profound human experiences anyone could have.

Schwarz’s poems are powerful and refreshing and her work deserves our serious attention.

Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 23, Issue 5.

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