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writing the book, he lives that passion, and the
“invisible victory” becomes the defeat of any
fear that might impede proclamation of the
truth. Showing his love for his homeland and his
gift for brilliant, vivid imagery and metaphor,
Buçpapaj interweaves concepts of home and
those who remember home and, in doing so,
touches what is human in us all.
Inherent in the poems is a longing for a lost
past that has not begun to fade from the reaches
of memory but that rather is separated only by
a thin, yet immovable curtain of time. Buçpapaj
examines the substance of time through the
poetic medium as though hopeful that he will
find some loophole through which he might
rescue all that was lost to him. Ironically, the
collection begins with the
image of the sunset in “The
Invisible Victory” — the
beginning of the end — and
it ends with a poem titled
“This Is Just the Beginning,”
which opens with an
image of the devil’s son
reigning on a throne of fire
and closes with a sad and
frightening prospect: the harvest has come and
death waits. The final stanza reads: “Farewell
/ You people remaining / At the beginning.”
It seems to be saying that all the hellish
experience documented in the book is only a
precursor to what is to come. Interestingly, both
“The Invisible Victory” and “This Is Just the
Beginning” are written in the past tense. The
collection is interspersed with brief, imagistic
poems much like stills from the action of mind
and memory. They force the reader to stop, take
a step back, and to gaze in awe at what simply
is, while realizing that any single moment is
timeless.
Buçpapaj occasionally speaks in the first
person, gradually bringing his own loss and
grief to the surface of the work. In the title
poem, which also opens the collection, the poet
makes himself known as an integral part of his
world and its circumstances:
I was also
Under the cracked skin
Of the sun’s
Rusty clothes
Measuring the color
Of corn fields (from “The Invisible Victory”)
The sun is setting, and there is an ominous
implication in the fact that the poem is written
in the past tense: “Life / Wasn’t enough for Man
/ To do good.” The poet speaks from beyond
this time, and his tone is brimming with a
nearly breathless melancholy; in it, we hear the
mournful echo as the sun disappears: too late,
it’s too late, too late.
Initially, the first-person persona seems
somewhat distant from events, albeit saddened
by what he has witnessed. It is not long,
however, before the narrator’s references to
himself become intimate and raw, thus making
the personal more universal:
O God
It seems to me
Instead of my Homeland
I have left a field
Of men
Devoid of sight
Behind the plane’s door (from “Dirty
Fantasy”)
It is when Buçpapaj makes himself most visible
in his poems that I can also hear the voices of an
entire nation of people. “A Letter to my Mother”
is the longest and one of the strongest poems
in the collection. Buçpapaj lives right on the
surface of this poem, and it contains some of the
most touching passages in the book. Buçpapaj’s
very tears have pooled in the midst of its lines:
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