Letters to Virgula

Dutch poet Sasja Janssen’s new collection opens with the speaker lying pregnant in bed, writing a letter to a comma. She’s pregnant with emptiness, ‘I write because I cannot utter a word / I write because the midwife has stuck her spade into me / … she stokes the emptiness’.

Janssen’s anthropomorphism of the Virgula, the Latin comma, is the key to her tapping into a stream of dynamic expressionism. Her Virgula is a friend, goddess, she-devil, muse, but mostly a confidant, staving off stagnation and the longed-for full stop.

Janssen’s ambitious poems are a lashed raft of disparate imagery and fragments of life propelled on a current of dependent and independent clauses. Her goals are mood and theme, rather than anecdote or recollection: ‘we fuck on a mattress with faded sunflowers / until we can fuck no more / … I’m nauseous and feel a presence behind my back, / it’s a tarantula that won’t be chased away, / … when a snake slips inside, the other carers shriek / chase away the snake with cloths, they’re just as young as me and / clap their hands briefly because I don’t understand them, / then the sky turns a darkened ochre’.

Janssen’s deliberate ambiguity occasionally makes the poems difficult to pin down, but at the same time highly re-readable. And while her language can very occasionally stray into the prosaic, predominantly her collection is full of original and memorable lines and passages, adeptly rendered by Hutchison: ‘and everything cracks with dryness as though it’s raining / it cracks with wrath, enough evil for the calyxes / to be nipped ...