Lucija Stupica
Vanishing Points (translated by Andrej Peric)
Arc Publications, £11.99

Vanishing Points is Lucija Stupica’s first collection translated from
Slovenian into English by Andrej Peric. Based in Sweden, Stupica
has previously published three collections; this fourth released in
2019. Singaporean poet Alvin Pang introduces Vanishing Points for
English speakers:

In her native Slovenia, Stupica is an award-winning literary
figure and celebrated cultural leader of her generation,
whose imagination and points of reference are richly
continental in breadth and restless in temperament.

A vanishing point is the sight of something that is both there and
not there; Stupica explores this sensation of separation – from her
past and present, existing in different places at once, what is gained
and what is lost (home, family, language and country).

Divided into five sections, an introduction, notes and
biographical information, poems appear, generously, in both
Slovenian and English. Broadly, Vanishing Points engages with
concepts of memory, history, family (Part 1); journeys, death,
separation, love (Part 2); the quotidian, routines, living on an island
(Part 3); language, symbolism, metaphor (Part 4); and reflections
on the past, time and death (Part 5). Several poems search for
inspiration from books, conversations, quotes and ekphrasis. A final
poem, ‘So We Could Claim’, appears outside the sections and both
summarises and expands her preoccupations.(8)

I’ve written this down. So we could claim.
Or was it someone else with me just appearing to be
sitting at a table, reading books and talking
with the dead, the living, with shadows and statues?

Reading these poems, I sensed they came from a place
outside or before language. In his introduction, Pang talks about the
decade of silence Stupica inhabited between her third and fourth
collections. These poems emerge from silence, from the
observation of the world around the poet and the speaker; a
transformation of the moment into language (often drawing on
narrative or the surreal). From ‘A Dream’:

Someone was just shaking out a tablecloth and stopped, twitched,
looked into the room over his shoulder, at the woman
leaning over a baby, speaking a language
unfamiliar to me. She had my face.

Charles Simic coined the expression ‘poetry is the orphan of
silence.’

[…] Perhaps lyric poetry is nothing more than the memory
of that instant of consciousness, a plea for words that would
equal the intensity of that experience? It’s a labor no less
phantasmagoric, no less metaphorical than alchemy. But
then, of course, the condition of the lyric is the belief in the
impossible.

(9)

I found myself returning, repeatedly, to this space of the poem
before language happens.

Stupica fills her poems with silence as a space of
contemplation and observation. ‘The Whisperer’ begins: ‘I wanted
to write a poem about the toad/ I’d met upon my way home’, then

Halfway through, we both stopped and turned into ourselves,
legless, headless, blinded by the setting sun,
pierced by the silence of the island, audience to one other.

In many of the poems, Stupica introduces us to the experience of
life on a small island, rhythms of nature, daily observations, time
spent in mundane tasks such as waiting for ferries, how change
slows down outside the city, for better or worse. ‘Four years.
You’ve become heavy as a rock.’ (10) Even in a poem about love,
‘Letters and Voices’, she sharpens the reader’s mind to tragedy; this
section brought to mind the photograph of Alan Kurdi (11)

LETTER THREE
New shoes
for the journey
seven hundred and more
a hollow rhythm
overloaded boats
voices
almost breathless
new shoes
on the shore
surelyâ??
inescapablyâ??

But silence, Stupica reminds us repeatedly, is also a verb;
when a person is silenced, by society or the choices they make in
life. Two poems speak to each other across time and space: in
‘History’, ‘The great men/ hang on walls, poised for upcoming
centuries’ while the women ‘hide behind doors’; in a twist at the
end, these women also return to their ‘lofty rooms to write history’.
In ‘The Beetle’, the poet is asked if she’s bored writing poetry.

For her, female poets are housewives
who write a poem once in a while,
and male poets are failed men
who shed an occasional tear or two.

Stupica wrestles with the tension throughout her poems that she is
a wife, a mother and a poet – that these roles nourish but also
constrain her. In ‘The Programme’, the poet, presumably Stupica as
poet, once the reading is over, exits the scene, as if shedding
identity. There are fathers and daughters encountered through
ekphrasis; in ‘Daughter and Father’ the poem closely observes a
photo, in ‘Letters and Voices’, ‘On the seat beside me, a father and
his daughter are looking at the photos from a family trip.’ Are these
people related to the speaker, or is she merely an observer? We do
not know. Death is also a space of silence, and several poems speak
both directly and indirectly to this: ‘we love one another/ empty
spaces.’(12)

Vanishing Points is a movement from inward to outward,
between expectation and memory, from waking to dream, from
silence to language, encountering love, loss and haunting. Stupica
explores how multiple entities can exist at once, through
observation and remembrance, much like a vanishing point is
infinite possibilities, forever falling into the distance.

SK Grout

7 From ‘Quick Thinking’.
8 Serendipitously and uncannily, this quote ties together the preoccupations of all three
collections reviewed by me in this issue.
9 Simic, Charles, ‘Some Thoughts about the Line’, from The Certain Uncertainty \
Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry, 1985: The University of Michigan Press, p113.
10 From ‘Island’.
11 The photo of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler refugee whose body washed up on a Turkish
shore, made headlines around the world.
12 From ‘Her Absence’.