Heloise Speaks – a verse novel by Irina Kuzminsky – review by Diana Durham

Deftly folding in scholarship, historical names, and references without overloading the verse, Kuzminsky traces the 12th-century story of Abelard and Heloise in a series of verse ‘letters’ based on existing letters that the two figures exchanged. Except that Kuzminsky’s stanzas are from Heloise alone. We hear of Abelard through them, not from him.

Heloise’s love, her insights, her ambitions, her entreaties, and the events themselves are wrought skilfully into a language that is accessible to our modern minds while imitating faintly a medieval style of expression, an effect that is sustained throughout the text without ever sounding forced:

            He prophesied a future for me golden and bejewelled

            Like the fair heavenly Jerusalem

            But all I felt was the unused to warmth of his caress

            And when I kissed his ring

            I made a silent vow:

            I would not be a nun or learned Abbess

            I would be learned, of course,

            But, though a woman, I would find another way.

Verse by verse, we are taken through the painful journey of love – body and soul – into the lovers’ separation, followed by disaster when Abelard is castrated by order of Heloise’s guardian as revenge for seducing and marrying her in secret. Early on in the collection, Heloise describes the embodied experience of her love for Abelard:

            I am adrift

            I am aflow

            I’m me – and more than me

            I’m matched and mated

But all too soon she feels alarm at Abelard’s subtle drawing back:

            But I can’t reason with a razor’s edge

            Or have your categories plague

            The living touch out of my speech.

And much of the power of these verse letters lies in the tension that Kuzminsky’s sometimes blunt, sometimes wistfully idealistic lines convey as Heloise oscillates between celebrating her love and bemoaning the gradual betrayal of it:

            I thought we were beyond misunderstandings

            That you should think I should need proof of you

            Of your fidelity

            (or maybe it is you who wanted proof of mine?)

            Means to me that we are no longer one

Heloise fears the betrayal not of Abelard the man so much as his conditioned mind, the intellect’s ability to rationalise away the reality of physical and spiritual union. But, after Abelard’s terrible maiming, Heloise wonders if she herself was not to blame:

                                                What prompted me

            To marry you and bring about your fall?

            Now claim your due, and see me gladly pay …

So ends Part I, in which Heloise speaks as student and lover. In Part II she is scholar and abbess, and what she ‘pays’ for Abelard’s ‘fall’ is to enter a convent where

            Years darken the threshold of my cell

            In a monotonous procession.

The former lovers continue their correspondence, but Heloise’s oscillation from love

to loss intensifies as present events give way to memories and hopeless longing for the past. These stunning lines convey her anguish:

            I’d swallow up the universe in that hole

            And crush all particles till they released their light-filled essence

            And then I’d swallow that light too

            And still it would not still nor sate me

All the passion in the universe flows through her but she cannot reach back to what used to be, expressed again brilliantly in this stark, poignant counterpoint:

            You knew how to speak true

            Once

While in beautiful, swift imagery Kuzminsky evokes the barren convent and Heloise’s desolation:

            Your words to me are colder than

            A bare stone floor

            And just as comfortless

            As sleet in winter

Even as she achieves renown and status as abbess, Heloise’s story of agony and ecstasy rolls on through her reflections. And perhaps Kuzminsky’s greatest achievement in this finely crafted retelling is to convince us – after so much turbulence – of the peace that the elderly Heloise, her hair now ‘pristine white’, finds as she contemplates her life and her love one final time:

            At last, now, I know better.

            I should have loved you even more,

            With more surrender, greater selflessness,

            For when I measure up my love to Christ our God

            And to Our Lady’s love for Him,

            Her Son, Whom She knew dying, broken,

            buried by Her hand

            I’m but a tiny midge

            Caught up in a huge swarm

            And all my suffering could never merit

            The joy of knowing that I knew a little

            What Love is

            Through this, my love for you.

The skill and beauty of this telling is in itself a substantial accomplishment. But Heloise Speaks also offers the modern psyche vital nourishment through the expression – and reminder – of the sacred power of feminine passion.

Heloise was exceptional in her time for her achievements. Throughout these verse letters she ponders her roles of scholar, lover, wife, mother, abbess. Although our own stories may not be as dramatic – usually nowhere near as tragic – we also balance love, marriage, motherhood, and career or artistic calling and find that we are not fully any one aspect. Gradually – and often catalysed by passionate love for another – we free up from our roles and our heartbreaks and embody the lightness of love:

            For I am Woman

            Holy Spirit

            Shekinah

            Sophia

            Mary

            Eve

            Mysterious Dove

            Wings strong enough to break through any cage

Heloise Speaks: A Verse Novel was published by Amethyst Press in 2022. Irina Kuzminsky is also the author of Dancing with Dark Goddesses. Diana Durham's most recent collection of poems is Labyrinth.