An Armenian Athena at the Loom

Amazon.com
By Grady Harp

History’s Twists: The Armenians by Helene Pilibosian, Ohan Press, 171
Maplewood St. Watertown, MA 02472-1324, 2008, 96 pp., $15.00.

Helene Pilibosian is a unique, fine poet, a woman overflowing
with her Armenian heritage which she celebrates throughout this book of
poems, weaving the ancient history, the not so distant history of the early
1900s and the current reflections of the many transplanted Armenians who
have settled in many countries after the Diaspora that followed the 1915
horror on her colorful and richly detailed loom. She has a profound respect
and understanding of the place of Armenia in world history and for those
readers whose knowledge of that country’s changing geography and
relationship to the great kingdoms and conquerors, Pilibosian has a
technique that allows entry into this under-appreciated past.
But what makes Pilibosian’s poetry most interesting and seductive
is her interlacing the immigrant experience with the voices of ‘those who
stayed behind’. Some of these poems, written in a narrative style with a
refreshing respect for language as it describes and plays with itself in
rhyme, address contemporary issues peculiar to Armenians while others step
into the universal arena, a space enlightened by a mind whose focus and
devotion has been honed by a respect for roots.
We are never quite sure how many of Helene Pilibosian’s characters
are real and how many are convenient creations for poetic dialogue. She
can be very first person personal: ‘I spilled my American hopes/of many
afternoons/on the pavements that wore my life./An Armenian daughter
doesn’t forget/the name that gets her born,/ the long curls that were
shorn.’ She can be a resource for history: ‘Oral history is a vagrant
goat…Orphans were necessary for survival./ America and Europe were the
pills….Remembrance is the epitaph/for ghosts of humble glory.’

She pays homage to some of the great Armenian artists as in
‘Letter to Khachaturian on his 100th Birthday, 2003, to painter Arshile
Gorky, Mihran Manoukian, Aivazovsky and others. But for this reader she is
most effective in her longer, rapturously beautiful poem ‘Letter to Nazeli’,
an exchange of thoughts and feelings between one who stayed in the homeland
and one whose physical presence is in a foreign Gilead.
Doubtless with the publication of this book Helene Pilibosian’s
importance as a contemporary poet will be more widely recognized. She
deserves her special place in the pantheon of humanistic artists.

(Grady Harp is a retired surgeon, poet, art buff and prized reviewer for
amazon.com where this review was originally posted.)

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress