Zayra Yves is a California based poet who reads, writes and travels the world and nearby satellites reading her work. In Ordinary Substance we see a woman writing with abandon, leaping into the sky of inspiration…
Impressions:
Zayra Yves presents a surprising difficulty in reviewing her book of poetry Ordinary Substance. There are both abstract poems of love and very concrete discrete imagistic Impressionistic poems. She writes of lovers yes, but they’re not coming to her bed, they’re coming to the beautiful sun-drenched flower at the center of her being.
There are four chapters, chapbooks perhaps, combined to one unified whole. The highlights of the first book are Becoming Abstract, where the poet begs to be concrete and whole and prefers
“to be held more often” and Bodies of Angels, fallen people like you and I perhaps, who
“wait for their voices of transmutation while ancestors shake the rattles, cast healing bones into a circle” and “we remember being born dying falling… Our salty hearts torn from shells”
The Dream That Love Sent is maybe the best of the volume, her lover a dream who
“came from the waters of ancestors/ ancient wonder, dust and isolation” he is
“open hearted without tears/ like a soul shaped in a Mandala/ that circle of fire burning from within” and together they became “light swimming toward more light”
Part two yields gems like What I was not Counting On and What Cannot Rest in Peace and the poetry takes a darker turn, graveyards appear and love is sometimes lost, lovers leave before or after her heart has seen to protect itself, she gives an ex-con a name on the subway and lets God roll you in a joint and smoke you.
The third book is heavy, freighted with lust and the scent and surrender of sex, as in Thrust of Sky and Bittersweet where
“in the heart we move undiluted, uninhibited”
Sheba’s Song is another memorable verse, her
“heart is a vineyard of grapes ripe and full”
and Discovering Agamemnon followed by Temple Dancing where her
“body uncoils, unveils coral hues, sapphire blue” is another treat of the third book.
The final book starts with a collection of portraits, as Island Goddess, Street Monk, Healing Hands and At Ugly’s Saloon all work enchantments of the poet’s vision. She writes an ode to Pilgrim Hitchhiking on the Road of Life, in
“gratitude for sharing this road of phenomena, where I too am lost sometimes in the unknown”
and speaks of being
“abandoned to your song as a first and last kiss / of immense awareness while our lives / circle around each other / to meet again at the crossroads.”
The volume is finished with a powerful chain of poems, she vanishes between water molecules in Dissolving, sees all the stars of heaven in Pinholes, writes of
“uncharted love just waiting to be discovered”
in The Heart Moves into the Body, or begs to be allowed to
“cultivate the light (the sweet songs from your voice) and bloom in the night like magnolia” in And, it was going to rain…
The volume finishes with the bold statement of Sanctuary, a poem about her love who
“arrived in a dream / and left the same way”,
who rises
“like a sweet fragrance in the strangely lonesome field / I call “myself”, to populate it with love”
and when she starts to think it is dead then
“Suddenly the selfless joy of our embrace / emerges like a rose in sunlight / … and once again / I am surrounded by flowers / in full bloom.”
Zayra Yves is described in the introduction as a Mystic Poet and this work contains many such flights of fancy but she’s also sometimes very down to earth here, especially in the second book. But for the most part this is an ambitious work, these are poems to read at the beach perhaps, when you can close your eyes after each one and let the sun bake their dreams into your brain.
They intoxicate the careful reader like opium.
Ordinary Substance is published by Magdalena and Co, Santa Clara Ca Copyright Zayra Yves 2007
Panoply of Life 