Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025
Lynda Tavakoli’s, A Unison of Breaths – Reader’s Review by Mark Ulyseas.
Arlen House (2024) • Language: English • Paperback • ISBN: 9781851323326
Available at: https://www.kennys.ie/shop/a-unison-of-breaths-9781851323326 https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/search/isbn/9781851323326 https://www.alanhannas.com/a-unison-of-breaths_9781851323326
To contact the author for interviews, readings, and other events:
lyndatavakoli@aol.com
Cover design by Irish artist Emma Barone.
When I sat down to read Lynda’s new book of poems it was on a flight back to Bali. Initially I flipped through the book, put it aside and then picked it up again when the cabin fell silent. The only other sound was the hoarse breathing of a child lying in the arms of her mother sitting in the row behind me.
I had the pleasure of working with Lynda on her ebook, The Greying Wood of Trees, A Dementia Anthology (May 2024). And so, this gave me a sense of ‘knowing the poet’, an essential prerequisite to understanding and appreciating her new collection of poems.
There are 64 poems. A kaleidoscope of words, creating images, that makes a fascinating read, and rattles the senses.
Her family features prominently in the opening pages with the dedication to her sister, Jean and a number of poems featuring her beloved mother. In Cold Tea…
In the good room of our small bungalow
Mum read tea leaves from china cups
Rescued from the Oxfam shop,
her slight frame and unassuming manner
a mere subterfuge for her divining skills
….
Looking back, I should have read the signs myself –
Cups of tea, half drunk and cold, perched
on the bird table or teetering on bathroom shelves
and once or twice abandoned by our father’s garden tools,
that sedge of herons she had planted by the pond.
And then in Requiem For The Unbeliever…
I lost my faith one dog-damp afternoon
In our mother’s sitting room,
Where her two-bar electric fire
Sizzled heat in the unfamiliar space of her leaving.
….
Listen to my footfall in your heart, it said
I am not gone but merely walk within you –
A message of redolent of all Sunday sermons
steeped in Christian kindliness and understanding.
Yet in that sitting room, it would not do
to set a precedent, for even the departed faithful
had to learn to play the rules. And so, I acquiesced
and left the room, my apostasy finally complete.
In this poem one witnesses the struggle of the poet to accept the finality of death whilst standing in the presence of her mother’s ‘space’. Perhaps the relationship between mother and daughter had been left in an unfinished mode, with ‘faith’ being shrugged off for fear of accepting the finality of death, after life, and what might be waiting in the unknown.
This is followed by Why You Should Always Listen To Your Mother,
When my daughter got her ears pierced
she crumpled to the tiles like a sudden
exhalation of some ancient accordion.
She had done everything properly…
Lynda takes us on a detour from familial encounters to the savagery of humankind in, The Letting (Auschwitz/Birkenau)
There remains yet the odour of absence
and a silent keening of ghosts
that suppurates in weeping walls.
On stoned pathways the hushed footfall
of the dead still treads its beat,
marking time for souls selected
for their usefulness,
a finger’s point away from
one more beating heart or none.
The imagery of desolation and hope comes through in, When the Rains Failed,
When the rains failed nothing grew,
and wasted seeds dimpled dry earth
like buckshot. Yet words still spoke
behind the shroud of her eyes-
words that painted promises;
sorghum, baobab, cassava, akkerboon-
she ensured the children’s tongues
would never snag in their telling.
And as the pages turn one comes to, The Sadness of Crows…a poem that leaves the reader with a sense of unbelonging.
Before the day opens its eyes,
on a fence
two black crows,
their thistle throats
rinsing the morning
with sorrow.
If I could
I would offer them
the fragile bones
of a vanished chick,
its soul seeping quietly
into warm-dug earth.
Lynda has set many traps for the reader in this collection. From childhood recollection to What Remains, leaves the ‘onlooker’ struggling to grasp the handle of sanity…
‘Please will you come and see my war crime?’
Of everything
this is what finally broke me –
the request small, polite.
A father.
The body of his dead boy
in a coffin car of cold and bloody dark.
The last poem, Endings, explains what this collection is about – the acceptance of our fate, our kismet, and perhaps the legacy that we leave behind.
Death meets us all,
spilling its shadow
into the unknown;
the curve of our lives
completing itself in endings
frayed by private histories
And those we leave behind
will know their grief the same;
the privileged, the ordinary,
whose sorrow sings on different winds,
yet every song a sharing
of its own ineffable loss.
Reading this book brings with it an apprehension of sorts. How can one really understand what the poet, Lynda, is communicating? Words dilute the essence of thought. Readers from different cultures can often find hidden gems where the poet thinks there are none. And it is this discovery that makes A Unison of Breaths so ‘fulfilling’ (for want of a better word).
I have touched upon only a handful of poems from this rich collection. There are a lot more gems waiting to be discovered by readers from around the world.
A Unison of Breaths is akin to an ancient mosaic floor with its cracked ceramic pieces that make up the beautiful geometric design of life. Each piece holding the memory of people both past and present, a unison of breaths.
This book begs to be translated into other languages.
Highly recommended for those who like to carry a poetry book to read on a journey.
© Mark Ulyseas
Lynda Tavakoli is a professional member of The Irish Writers Centre and has been nominated for Best of the Net Awards and the Pushcart Prize (2024). Her poetry and prose have been widely published in journals, newspapers, anthologies and magazines, including Live Encounters Digital books. Lynda has been the winner and runner-up of several International Literary Awards that include The Westival International Poetry Prize, The Blackwater International Poetry Competition, The Roscommon Poetry Competition and the Mencap International Short Story Competition. ‘A Unison of Breaths’ (Arlen House) is Lynda’s second full collection of poetry.
Mark Ulyseas is Publisher/Editor of https://liveencounters.net
A brilliant review of Lynda’s Poems by a wonderful Reviewer. Thank you both very much.