Voice of Ice by Alta Ifland

Les Figues Press, 2007
Review by GA. A. Banks-Martin

True Birth

Voice of Ice, a collection of prose poems, by Alta Ifland, an ambitious group of poems in which the speaker seeks to discover her true self. The poems are highly descriptive and many times highly surrealistic often leaving us with the sense that we have just been somewhere familiar but unfamiliar. For example, the first lines of Birth:

I was born in a lapse of time, my hand clinging to a
dandelion, my feet gripping a vine leaf, my nose on my
back, and eye on my ankle.
Of course, no one remembers being born but it is safe to say that this description is far from the truth. However, as the poem develops, so does an explanation:
My mother wasn’t present at my birth or maybe she was
there and her pain of being torn apart still throbs in my veins.
The idea that the infant was born with what seems to be several malformations is really a way of introducing the book’s primary theme: deconstruction of self. The narrator
must return to the point at which she is purest, the point at which all knowledge is innate, to be reborn and reopened to basic learning.

That learning includes discovering there is something worst than being unhappy: having been abandoned by your own unhappiness. As is the case of My neighbors, a couple who have tried to find contentment via plastic surgery and antidepressants only to find that those solutions lead to more plastic surgery and antidepressants. Surgery has left the wife’s face so distorted that it sounds as if her surgeon was really a cubist painter, the husband shows no physical signs malady but has the odd ability to discuss prescribing information and general concerns encountered while taking any antidepressant. They are so unhappy they no longer know they are unhappy; unhappiness has become a lifestyle.

The last lesson of the book is simple, we have been educated to understand everything, is recycled, thus, Even death is no longer final. While the poem Death illustrates this well, the basic thought was quietly developing along side all of the other ideas, as the poet has translated each poem into French, her native language, symbolically, the lost, and regaining of national identity.

Therefore, when we reach the end of Alta Ifland’s Voice of Ice, we have witnessed the fascinating rebirth of a human being, a being free of ego, preconceived notions of identity, national or otherwise, and formal learning. What we encounter about life and ourselves is funny, uncomfortable, familiar and difficult but refreshing and well worth struggle.

The poet, Alta Ifland, was born in Eastern Europe, studied literature, and philosophy in France, and lives in California.