Élan Vital by Simona Blat

In Simona Blat’s chapbook Élan Vital, slant syllogisms fall like cosmic rays over blackcurrant and dill, rockets and toxic meat, Goethe and Darwin, showing us that a thought is not different from a garden, in both its creativity and its enigma. Part polemic, part ode to the natural and unnatural world, Blat’s poems borrow Henri Bergson’s notion of a “vital impetus” in considering the miraculous possibilities of the creative impulse in all its forms, in the light of a poisoned earth. In the end, the poems paradoxically manage to express an inexpressible, interstellar unity, “the type of light that all things run down.”

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There was no water in the splendid garden.
There was a monastery in the garden.
Sand was blowing in the garden.
There were men in the garden.
Barren rocks and ravens in the garden.
Ebony eyes of mice in the garden.
A black cross worn around a neck in the garden.
Russian philosophy in the garden.
Nothing means anything in the garden.
Mushroom letters seeding the grass in the garden.
A lunar menses in the garden.
A white box of cotton in the garden.
Fathers and sons touching in the garden.
Little infusions in the garden.
One big book in the garden.
Bach, Tchaikovsky, Chopin in the garden.
Another war in the garden.

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Simona Blat is a writer living in Brooklyn, NY. She is the owner of Black Spring Books and the author of the chapbook Funeral (2018) made in collaboration with Pixel Press. More of her work can be found online.