Mirror, Mirror
Jakob Ziguras
2024; 279 pp.; $22.95 (paperback)
Mirror, Mirror: Review of Venetian Mirrors
You’ve almost certainly seen it, can see it now in your mind’s eye: Claude Monet’s painting of Venice’s San Giorgio Maggiore at dusk, the church and its dark, dark red campanile melting into the sea, leaving behind only its own murky reflection. If the painting was cut in half, if we could see only the reflected image, which a light breeze seems to be scattering before our eyes, would we even know it was a church?
Jakob Ziguras’s Venetian Mirrors is no ordinary poetry book, and not just because at 342 pages it’s more than quadruple the length of many contemporary poets’ 80-page volumes. Like Monet’s painting, it takes a long look at Venice and finds that the city’s soul—if it still has one, and on some pages that supposition seems fleeting—is best found in its reflections.
To that end, every poem in this book—except for a baker’s dozen at the close—is expressed twice. Once, on the lefthand page, in four very carefully controlled quatrains that each follow a sonnet-like abba rhyme scheme, and once again on the righthand page, where the same poem is remixed into a prose piece that uses all the same words (or parts of those words), but in a different order and often to vastly different effect.
Ziguras, a Polish-born poet who grew up in Australia and now lives in Wrocław, says he was influenced by Venice’s long history of mirror-making, and we learn in David Bentley Hart’s energetic foreword that Ziguras assembled many of the reflective prose poems with paper and scissors.
It shows, and in all good ways. Though the lineated poems on the lefthand side are exceptionally restrained, never deviating from the four-line stanzas, never deviating from the abba scheme, the prose poems, ironically, seem to have been assembled with an even greater degree of control, with words, even syllables (Ziguras gives himself permission to remix individual words on occasion, and alter capitalizations) all reading as though placed with a mosaic artist’s care.
The third quatrain of poem 26, “Propitious Stars,” for example, reads:
The exarch exodus, on sandy bars— a crippled people hobble past on stilts, 113
across a turbid battleground of silts, trailing their nets to catch propitious stars—
Whereas its prose counterpart, or reflection, concludes:
…shopping a mall mirror. On your knees, in the barnacle hall, erasing snaring mud of a past tide, preserve, Bard, the savour of salt and tracks of need among sandy coasts, or footsteps which squelch into propitious silts to catch the Everwater—hung there as X, both Arche and loam at once.
For all its exactitude in construction, this is frequently playful work for both writer and reader alike: I enjoyed puzzling through the prose poems to find what connected where, to see where meanings changed or deepened or new images emerged. When I encountered the unreflected—for lack of a better word— poems at the very end of the book, which are not set in Venice, I found that I missed the mirrors. There was still meaning to be made, but more quietly.
More than a few of the poems indicate that a specifically Catholic imagination is at work. It’s not just that some of the poems explicitly explore Catholic imagery. The lineated portion of “Almost Venetian,” for example, concludes, “…Dawn lifts up its bloody host; / polluted waves pass on the sign of peace,” but it’s the prose portion that truly activates the poem, which concludes:
On thought’s lowly estuary: dawn drags her burden of golden robes; hosts of the sea pass in polluted shallow puddles; almost gone, boatmen on a barge rue a haul of mist. But, by this Word You bind it—vain gloat—in text intertwined like Venetian Venice, silken silk.
Someone I always turn to as a guide to the literary Catholic imagination, Loyola University Chicago’s Michael P. Murphy, reminds us in an essay for Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal that “The attributes and qualities that are closest to core Catholic mysteries (the Incarnation, for example) are the ones that are not only most transformative and vibrant, but are also the ones that, more often than not, make for good art.” That obtains in Ziguras, but even more so in Murphy’s attention to
…one such attribute: the complexio oppositorum—the “complex of opposites”—as a consideration of it will illustrate habits of creation and interpretation. In an orienting insight offered by Notre Dame President Fr. John Jenkins at a conference on Catholic identity, he mused that “the primary feature of being Catholic is to hold two completely opposite things up together and to proceed as if they are not opposite.”
The paired poems of Ziguras’s Venetian Mirrors are not quite opposites, but they benefit greatly from being held up together and witnessed for the useful mysteries that result. For my own part, I moved between feeling as though Ziguras was up to something new here or participating in something very old— ekphrasis—art about other art.
In the end, though, what I thought of most was Venice, its churches and treasures and canals, of water, everywhere, always. Just as water finds its level, I felt Venice had found its best form in this fascinating, engrossing book. And I was reminded of something Pope Francis said in May 2023, when he addressed a gathering of writers and artists at the Vatican:
There are things in life that sometimes we can’t even understand or for which we can’t find the appropriate words: this is your fertile ground, your field of action. And this is also the place where you often experience God. An experience that is always “overflowing”: you can’t take it, you feel it and it goes beyond; it is always overflowing, the experience of God, like a pool where water falls continuously and, after a while, it fills up and the water overflows, overflows.
So, too, Venice, so, too, Venetian Mirrors. Let the waters rise. Art like this keeps us afloat in a troubled world.