This Year Her Present

wasn’t a book —
my shelves sag under the weight of volumes
she’s given me over the last two decades
since I moved from Ukraine to Ireland;

wasn’t a dress —
she has such a sharp sense of style:
the last one was a black linen gown
with traditional cross-stitched sleeves;

wasn’t a postcard —
bought at the vintage fair in Kyiv
where she knows every vendor by name
and they welcome her soft, smiley face;

wasn’t a notebook —
she chooses journals one-of-a-kind,
leather-bound, with printed fore-edges
on pastel pages, growing glowers and vines;

wasn’t a sweets box —
candies no Irish store can match
in their taste, the songs we spun on air
and echo of our side-splitting laughs;

wasn’t fragrant mead —
Piastowsky or Kurpiowksy drinking honey
I can’t get in Dublin for love or money, so she
packed it in her luggage for me in Lodz duty free.

This year her present was
a brown bottle of Lugol iodine — to swallow
when the heavy air wears a radiation halo
at the edge of nuclear war.

• Reprinted courtesy of Arlen House

This week’s poem is from the newly published anthology of Irish women’s poetry, Washing Windows V. The anthology’s series title has a significant founding story. The poet Eavan Boland, a major supporter of women’s talent, was told by a gifted writer in her workshop that she didn’t want her poems to be published. It was because if her neighbours knew she was a poet they’d think she never washed her windows. I hope she and her neighbours since changed their minds.

The current collection celebrates the 50th anniversary of Arlen House, Ireland’s first feminist press, with new, unpublished poems by more than 300 poets from Ireland and beyond. Many names will be familiar to readers, among them, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Medbh McGuckian, Sinéad Morrissey, Rita Ann Higgins, Kerry Hardie and, an unexpected pleasure, Edna O’Brien. The so-far less familiar, younger generations of writers are well-represented: they include Victoria Melkovska, a poet and journalist, born in Ukraine in 1977 and resident in Ireland since 2003.

It’s clear from the self-assured informality of tone in This Year Her Present that the writer knows her readers well and effortlessly shares their verbal idioms. Her list of presents from home is cleverly organised by means of a title that functions as a first line, leading to an unexpected negative, “wasn’t”. “Wasn’t” is the key that opens in each quatrain a treasury of earlier gifts from a female relative or friend, based elsewhere, possibly in Kyiv, but persistently “present”. The gifts transport a shared cultural identity, while the donor remains un-named. Obliquely, Melkovska’s poem functions as a “thank you” letter, while being at the same time an entrusting proclamation of her own identity to the wider audience looking over her shoulder.

The first present evoked leads to an image of overstocked “sagging bookshelves” – the kind most of us can relate to – inexpensive, ad hoc, not the comfortably rooted bookshelves of long-established library owners. Suggesting a combined love of books and lack of privilege as common denominator, the phrase may help attune readerly sympathies. Elsewhere, the unique preciousness of home is asserted, sometimes through flavoursome gifts of food and drink that might locally be thought exotic, and can’t be obtained “for love or money”.

A “vintage” postcard brings the sender’s face into sudden friendly perspective: more mysterious is the “one-of-a-kind” notebook or journal, with its “printed fore-edges / on pastel pages”, designed to reveal glimmers of pattern or picture as you fan the leaves. Melkovska doesn’t tell us directly if painful reminders are carried by the gifts. Each of them, whether a dress or notebook, is welcome and life-enhancing: a talisman.

Melkovska’s stanza-structure is generally cohesive, but there’s an exception in stanza five: “[This year her present] wasn’t a sweets box …” “Sweets box” is refreshingly un-idiomatic, and it allows the expansion of the idea that the word “sweets” has a Shakespearean dimension (as in Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1, “Sweets for the sweet …”). For Melkovska, too, the sweets are not mere confectionery: they contain “the songs we spun on air / and echo of our side-splitting laughs”. This meeting of the giver and the recipient might have been face-to-face, although “on air” could suggest virtual or radiophonic contact. Of course, “spun on air” also evokes “spun sugar” and other kinds of aeration, literal and metaphorical. In any event, there’s no doubt of the happy reciprocity of sweets shared between speaker and present-sender.

After the sensuously delicious verbal evocations of Polish “honey mead” in the sixth stanza, the final awaited revelation is particularly stark: “This year her present was / a bottle of Lugol iodine”. The poem might have ended there, with a potent silence and, perhaps, a footnote explaining the purpose of the iodine. Melkovska chooses to follow her structural template, to seek images of the unthinkable, and the name of the unnameable.

Besides the “heavy air”, she conjures the light of the radio halo in the newly sinister form of a “radiation halo”.

In the context, the reference to “the edge of nuclear war” reminds us there is an edge that politicians, even the worst of them, might draw back from, but that there is no end to the potentiality of such a war when narcissism habitually attracts them to that edge. It’s a reminder, too, that no national borders, no kinds of edge, are observed by radiation.

• Victoria Melkovska’s first collection For the Birds was published in 2023. You can enjoy a short reading by the poet here.