pi & anne

I’m delighted to share the following review by Pippa Phillips of my book landmark status woman, which Alan Summers has accepted for publication in Pan Haiku Review Issue 5!

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Pippa Phillips: landmark status woman
by Kati Mohr (Pan Haiku Review issue 5)

Kati Mohr’s landmark status woman is a collection of tanka sequences– including a sequence of cartoon haiga. The poems are arranged in chapter-like collections whose titles invite us to reflect on their themes in indirect ways. The work is lyrical but grounded– resonant emotions are punctuated with plainspoken colloquialisms. Although the poems in the volume stand on their own merits, they grow and reveal more in their relation to each other.

Kati Mohr is a prolific German poet whose intuitive, boundary-pushing work in micropoetry has appeared widely in poetry journals. She has previously published a work of tanka, something with feathers. Her work is subjective and observational, which provides a strong grounding for the author’s tendency to experiment.

In Japanese micropoetry, the technique of linking to a verse while also shifting away from it is an important technique– Mohr elevates it to an ideology in landmark status woman. The relationship between title and sequences, to the images they are sometimes ensconced in, and of the sequences to each other, create crackling layers of energy. The complex yet genial language invites the reader to return to the book again and again, searching for a meaning that is elusive because it shifts from one reading to another.

Initially, the poems center on childhood and becoming. Mohr explores the tensions between coming to know your parents and coming to know the world, the line between oneself and one’s world, one’s significance to that world, to others, and to oneself. It is among these tensions that we catch glimpses of what it is to be human. The poems paint a picture of the emergence of a kind of consciousness, wistful, lonely, and yearning, as attuned to what isn’t as to what is.

What does it mean to be oneself, what does it mean to be with another, how much of oneself comes from that, and how much is compromised by our connections? How much of our disconnection to ourselves has to do with our disconnection from others? Mohr’s work is deeply humanistic, implicitly feminine and feminist.

To be a woman is to be unable to be only an individual– at points Mohr notes the ways that she compromises herself and grows smaller– but that is also what being human is. No man is an island. Women are not allowed the fiction of true individualism– but after all, it is only a fiction. None of us can divide ourselves wholly from our context:

the sparrows chirp wildly
in the overgrown garden
it’s june again
with all that is thrown at me
what can i call mine?

The chapter titled triangle construction draws lines between self, lover, and that which houses them. At one end is the connection of romance, at its best expansive and at its worst limiting. At the other end is an onanistic level of self, a self split into two, I and Thou, the self that observes and the self that is observed. At its height, the author issues an imperative to find the world in herself:

hold it
isolate the sound
I close my eyes
the music stops
I can hear the blood river roar

Is one’s world a kind of house, or is one’s house a kind of world? Retreating into domesticity, Mohr explores the house as a sort of interface– between oneself and the other members it houses, between oneself and the external world, between one’s family and the world. It also serves as a shelter, a way to create or preserve oneself:

silhouetted
in the doorway
something fierce
I’m going to open
as I am

In observations of the quotidian, Mohr explores the largeness of small moments, and the smallness of large moments. About religion, the author is unsentimental and skeptical; for her, spirituality lies in food, in a well-loved book, in spring flowers and morning mist, in a worn sofa.

on a scale of counting all red things to not finding words
we settle at a table for bread and Boursin.

By the end of the work, we have a picture of the poet poised at the moment of action, but not yet acting– consideration of action is itself an act:

the sunlight dot dot dots the crests
just by thinking
I sweat

The poem is the Cartesian insight embodied in a transient moment– I think, therefore I am. The world impacts me like a wave, and my shore ebbs and flows. Fundamentally, I am connected. We all are.