Ophelia After Centuries of Trying

Beryl Baigent is a poet; her published collections include Absorbing the
Dark, Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins, Triptych: Virgins, Victims,
Votives, and Mystic Animals.

Merike Lugus was born in war-torn Estonia (then part of the USSR) in
1943, and lived in Germany and Sweden before coming to Canada. She is a
sculptor and visual artist, and in this, her first book of poems, she
invokes these skills in her metaphors and language.

The book’s title suggests an archetypal Ophelia: a woman who embodies
the romantic notion of womanhood. In several of the earlier poems,
Ophelia is a worrier who is “watching, waiting”; like her role
model, she finds herself in the throes of a metaphorical drowning as
“she stirs along a muddy bottom / jostled gently by currents of
memory.” In a poem that echoes Plath’s “Daddy,” we find the
protagonist trusting an authority figure, her own “Daddy, “ even
though he is “a walled-in man,” while the title poem introduces her
“young man poised like a prince,” who only confuses her.

Lugus also investigates several aspects of identity relating her
personal history as war refugee, daughter, lover, and parent. Her images
are striking and innovative. She may be seduced “to follow / on the
backs of butterflies flirting with / the outstretched arms of pines,”
or be a ghost rising and “balance tiptoe at cliff’s edge / supreme
diver sea bird.” Her life “sits tender / like a radioactive moon,”
and she stands “between the towering legs of / the Colossus of Love /
a small dog yipping to [her] heart’s content.” These are poems of
love, loss, and life. Even though the poet exhorts her readers,
“[D]on’t look to me for meaning,” her poems exemplify the journey
from innocence through experience and onward.