Taking a selfie has become an indispensable part of our digital culture. You pick up your phone, look at the screen and voila, there you are in the middle of your own photo.
It’s a quick way to take a photo and it’s about nothing more than showing yourself. Who the new poetry collection The dark room by Aly Freije (veelerveen, 1944), discovers that there are other ways to show who you are. Together with photographer Annemarie van Buuren, she made an intriguing search for who we are on this chaotic planet and how finite it is.
The motto of the collection is in a poem: ‘a poet must go into the dark room like a photographer / to bring to light / to give ground to loss’. This loss is mapped out in poems that overwhelm with metaphors and diffuse black-and-white photos. It is no coincidence that an angel, as a light bearer and feathered being, plays an important role in this. His arrival is ambiguous: ‘she moves into a shipping container / gets an angel at the door who coughs / they both know about the dissonances / a creaking lock, wreckage’. They embark on the adventure, it is shadowy just like the photos and finally the angel brings signs when the ‘I’ is almost drowning.
Dictators stared with dead eyes
In the next two parts, the poems and the photos become increasingly sharp: ‘in photos she tries to capture desire /, the blowing / of treetops, waving grass / scents of juniper / evaporating over an uninhibited body’. At the same time there is this world: ‘war news was advancing, a world turned upside down / dictators stared with dead eyes / from shattered facades’. So how do people continue to move on? In the last poem there is something you can read as an answer:
the rapid flapping of wings
of a soaring skylark
the scents of bloom
of star moss and lady’s mantle
tinkling and tingling on the skin from sun and wind
(…)
the soft humming
of the rotating planet
on which we look for horizons
to inexorable
an edge has been reached
The dark room is a special set of photos and poems that allow people to associate and connect. The photos show edges of landscapes, things, but also the body of a woman, a plant. These images slowly reveal things, a great contrast to the quick selfie. This is a bundle for those who want to search, reflect and then breathe calmly again.
Freije and Van Buuren
Title The dark room
Author Aly Freije & Annemarie van Buuren
Publishing house In De Knipscheer
Price 16.50 euros (48 pages)
★★★★★