The Sinuosity of Straight Passions by Paul Hartal

 

An inspiring and stimulating collection of cognitive and lyric verse, The Sinuosity of Straight Passions by Paul Hartal offers a magic voyage of consciousness percolated through the cosmic music of the spheres.

 

For the poet, the poetry of the heart is the heart of poetry. The motif of passionate love occupies a central place in his work. Yet passions transcend carnal love. They can be converted into spiritual energy, transformed into care and compassion, sublimated into loving kindness and noble acts of self-sacrifice.

 

The poem “Every Man Remains an Island” reflects a dialectical view of human existence. Unlike John Donne’s famous metaphysical meditation, “No Man is an Island”, Hartal’s opus expresses an intrinsic sense of our individual loneliness and isolation, while also affirms the redeeming power of love.

Dr. Maria Salenius , Lecturer in British Literature at the University of Helsinki, writes: “I find the poem’s interaction with Donne and his mind very insightful. I am sure that Donne himself would agree with its sentiments. His own lines about no man being and island were written at a time when he came very close to death, and somehow I feel that his words there reflect some of the fear of the loneliness that we face at the end of our lives, no matter how many close ones we may be lucky to have near us. But Donne did indeed also experience his share of utter isolation in his life. Donne had, of course (so I believe), a very strong faith in the constant presence of his God in his life, also close to his death, but this consideration is a separate issue in Meditation XVII. I also believe, especially in light of his own personal history, that Donne would have highly applauded Hartal’s beautiful treatment of ‘truelove’ in the poem.”

 

You pace with the gaudy crowd,
the pied throngs on urban land,
but you reckon all unbowed
that Every Man Remains an Island.

 

Albeit the work is often shared
and you adore her and would love
to be loved forever and cared
for , treasuring loyalty, your truelove.

 

A bold bridge, you say, can cross
even the icy rivers of the winter,
yet the shimmery stars across
the sky offer infinite encounter .

 

Humanity’s long and intrinsic fascination with the night sky finds its expression in “The Divorce of the Moon”, which envisions the lunar satellite as an endangered species.

 

Another verse, “Triumphal Arch” explores the connectivity of Poetry to Mathematics. It carries in its patterned structure subject-bridging concepts such as symmetry, metaphor, space and time; and also the idea of ‘pure poetry’, the concept of message-free verse aspiring to reach the abstract ontological state of music.

 

At first
it was just a humble
creative idea,
a set of neurons firing up
in the right hemisphere
of the brain and hovering
in the arena of the mind.

 

Later it assumed
actual form on paper,
rising as a two dimensional
conceptual sculpture
constructed out of
repetitive letters
in multiple acrostics.

 

Shaped as a pattern poem,
Construed from
Periodic motifs
In translational symmetry…

 

“Triumphal Arch” forms part of an interdisciplinary project exploring the connectivity of Art and Mathematics under the aegis of Dalhousie University in Halifax. According to Jason Brown, PhD, Musicologist and Professor of Mathematics at Dalhousie, Hartal’s “poems and pictures are truly inspirational” and his “take on Zeno’s paradox captures the frustrating nature of it perfectly”.

 

The rhyming stanzas in the love poem “Yeux Bridés” were prompted by the taunting words of a Quebecois politician who unnerved Asians by calling them ‘slanted eyes’.

 

My ancestors did not build the Great Wall
Nor did they belong to ranks of Samurais
But when the Moon rises west of the Silk Road
I dream about the girl with comely oblique eyes.

 

As the years slip by and we grow old together
We walk hand in hand on fields of butterflies
Why do you love me? She asks and I tell her:
For your beautiful soul and your slanted eyes.

 

A major theme in Hartal’s work implicates war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“Samurai Competition” deals with Japanese atrocities in China, whereas “Rwanda 1994” presents a tragic scene in verse of the African genocide:

 

The Kagera River rises in Burundi white
It drags yellow trees and elephant grass green.

 

But then why the river runs red?
The day sunny like another.

 

Yet the streams tow and haul the dead
The currents carry your brother.

 

“Light at the Kernel of Darkness” pays tribute to the heroes of daring rescue missions, to their unshaken courage of loving kindness, during the dreadful night that descended on many countries in Europe occupied by the Third Reich. “The Exercise” is a monochrome memoir, a flashback scene that recounts the poet’s own experience as a child prisoner in a Nazi slave labor camp in Austria.

 

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]