My new collection of poems, Finns and Amazons, was launched in London in March 2012. You can order it from Arrowhead Press.
It begins with poems about some Russian women artists of the avant-garde but moves to poems based on history, family letters and a 2010 trip to Russia in search of my Finnish great-aunt who migrated to Stalinist Karelia in 1932 but disappeared in 1939.
On the back cover, Robert Chandler comments:
Nancy Mattson explores her family's complex history vividly but with a clear and honest understanding of how much must always remain unknowable. This imbues these sometimes tragic poems about Canada and the Soviet Union with a liberating sense of openness.
Virginia Woolf points out that as women writers we think back through our fore-mothers, the female line. And in Finns and Amazons Nancy Mattson thinks back. This rich and moving book explores the turmoil of the twentieth century as it affects the individual and those who, much later, look back, piecing together clues, retrieving what has survived. These poems have clarity and poise, conveying the power and fortitude of women as ‘Amazons’ , ensuring that one such woman who vanished into history did not disappear without leaving a trace, but is given record and honour. This is a true task of poetry, and it shines from these pages where we find the ‘simultané’ of life, one powerfully-articulated thread in the brutal tapestry of the twentieth century.
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Reviewers have included- Sheenagh Pugh, who observes that
...there's something about having a sense of displacement, rather than a sense of place, that gives a poet's language and observation an extra edge, almost as if they don't have a comfort zone.
Her full review is here.
- Douglas Barbour, who comments
... that one mind having seen both the art of those Amazons & the letters of that Finn, will, must, bring them into explosively bright contact across both space & time.
See his full review here.
- Mike Barlow, who quotes from the opening poem, ‘Simultaneity I’, and says:
In describing a Pandora’s box of memory and association, the surprise and sense of connection here mirrors the nature of the book. This is a body of work both thematically cohesive and rich in formal and narrative variety, a book I’ve found it easy to enjoy but hard to review – the closer you read the more there is to consider.
Read his full review here.
- Mike Horwood, who writes about both Finns and Amazons and Lines from Karelia.
Click here for the full review.
- Clare Best, who writes in Frogmore Papers 80:
The collection Finns and Amazons is a fascinating read. The poet inhabits with uncanny ease, vigour and insight the worlds of her female forbears, and of the various Russian women pioneer artists of the early 20th century who first piqued her interest and her poetic searches towards writing this book. Far from relying on documentary context for their power, the poems combine contemporary diction with historical and psychological detail, bringing back to life characters and events from the past. Mattson’s writing is consistently strong throughout the book, but the poems which make up the sections of the second half – ‘Letters’ and’ Legacy’ – made a particularly keen and lasting impression on this reader. Many of these pieces were inspired by letters written from the poet’s great-aunt Lisi in Karelia to a sister in Canada, in the 1930s. I read this thought-provoking and closely crafted collection alongside Lines from Karelia and would recommend this way of approaching the intensely moving story and inherent poetry of Mattson’s exploration and excavation of her family’s story and complex history across two continents and several generations. Mattson has produced poems of great skill and power that cross and recross emotional as well as geographical and cultural borders.
The pamphlet Lines from Karelia presents some of the documentary background which underpins the central story of Finns and Amazons. Here are translations of the intriguing freeform letters that Lisi wrote to her sister in Canada from Soviet Karelia, where she had travelled to help build a socialist utopia in the 1930s. An enthralling and important project is presented between these two publications. Four of the poems in Finns and Amazons also appear in this pamphlet, and there are photographs of the original letters, written in Finnish, and of various family members.
- Leah Fritz, whose substantial review in Acumen 73 includes assessments such as "Mattson deftly combines the spiritual with the down-to-earth. Whenever she feels a line is flying too high, she grounds it; if too mundane, she finds an image to raise it up again" and "Mattson's is a mature narrative poetry that combines scholarship and humanity with a sure musical sense."
