Such an ambitious and at the same time light-footed volume of poetry has not existed for a long time. Ambitious because “Going into the woods, stealing wood for a bed” consists of five large-scale cycles. Light-footed, because they are held in a seemingly quite everyday speech gesture. The longest cycle in the volume, “Linn Meier († 2019)”, could also be performed as a theater monologue. In fact, it is preceded by a kind of stage direction: “If the text is spoken, you could take apart a typical girl’s room furniture while speaking.”
“Linn Meier († 2019)” is the monologue of an anorexic teenage girl, spoken, as it is called, in “Fatsuit / so that nobody faints / on this wonderful evening”. The speed and intensity of the text create the impression that we are dealing with an authentic document, a document of existential loneliness: while the rest of the world cheerfully shovels food into itself and everyone and every woman bulges further and further in the direction of other bodies, around themselves To unite with these, Linn Meier counts calories and finds nothing more repulsive than the idea of having sex. She worries about hunger in the world and how her own systematic starvation relates to it. She draws up lists of dishes that she will not eat after all, and at the end – the supposed document is transformed into a kind of poetic vision – Linn Meier falls asleep, or rather falls asleep, to be in a different world than “Athena Linn Meier” to be resurrected with muscles that burst the fatsuit.
It should only be mentioned that in the cycle “Flammen” another, very contemporary goddess, “Cynthia Artemis Moll”, appears, and that the eponymous cycle begins in the Amazon and thus in the realm of wood-stealing Amazons.
Martina Hefter: Going into the woods, stealing wood for a bed. Kookbooks, Berlin 2020. 96 pages, 19.90 euros.
The cycle “Essays on Plants. Still Life” corresponds directly to “Linn Meier († 2019)”, as a kind of highly poetic counterpart or complementary piece. Here, too, the “nutritional table” is taken out of the cupboard, “food porn” is also watched here, but the situation is not so clear and the lyrical self is by no means as hostile to food as Linn Meier. It is almost in a symbiotic relationship with the plants: “I have the green blood of the trees, it rustles inside me. / The soft, wondrous sleeping grass flames / in my eyes, flames when I look into the garden: / The caretaker has again Sprayed with poison, the weeds lay withered, died. / I’m still awake. It’s night. “
The poems in “Essays about Plants” are enigmatic, dreamlike, and how one gets the impression that in Martina Hefter’s poems there is a second, almost invisible level populated by hybrid beings, forest spirits and devils.
In her last volume of poetry, “It could also be beautiful”, which arose from visits to her mother-in-law in the nursing home, it was actually little devils who were up to mischief on the ward. It goes without saying that Linn Meier is driven by the devil. Artemis and Athena are only half of this world themselves. In the last cycle of “Going into the woods, stealing wood for a bed” it also says: “There must be us spirits too. / We greet you / You who always look so earthly from your skin.”
In Martina Hefter’s poems, the magical world of poetry and the profane presence of the Maggi cooking studio are astonishingly close together. And they complement each other well.