The Garden Out of Dust

POETRY

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The poet of The Garden Out of Dust offers—to all who wish to listen to her, or rather, to see her—here for the first time, perhaps—a little tender longing for what is constantly passing away, a pinch of feeling for the companions of our everyday fortune and misfortune, a drop of melancholic yet solid hope for a more cheerful tomorrow.

She extends her hand toward us, smeared with the dusty garden colours, askew with disproportionate lore.

Ania Atsu lives in a hermitage hidden by the River Irwell, among anti-stunted groves of Manchester’s towers—from where she escapes to suburban steppes, those sandy dunes, those oceans of tangled, maddened heather. Yet in her daily hermitage, we will not find thick curtains of cobwebs, dried skins of venomous snakes, nor mysterious crucibles in which magical ingredients are brewed. Ania’s studio is a comfortable, sunlit room, filled with the gentle melancholy of a summer afternoon—a thoroughly modern refuge of a woman who is curious about the world and at the same time afraid of that clamorous, hysterical, and cruel world.

Artists usually have their better or worse nests. Over time, they grow feathers around themselves. Ania Atsu is a migratory bird, sitting in a garden made of dust.

She is an openly shy bird. She offers her friendship to personalities of cunning, arrogant cats, as well as to stray cats—meagre wanderers, wretched rogues who lost their ears in hooligan brawls. She offers her friendship to dogs who are snobs, playboys, and also to canine proletarians, chain-bound slaves stripped of honour and ambition. She offers his friendship to luxuriant trees that bow beautifully to the sky and clouds, as well as to scrawny, frail pines and birches.

In her studio, which is a contemporary hermitage, Ania Atsu undertakes lyrical voyages in famous aeroplanes that, like people, discovered something extraordinary or accomplished something important. Between her coffee breaks, she also drives old and renowned machines long forgotten by people today. (Those famous aeroplanes and renowned machines are books.)

Like every solitary soul longing not to be alone, Ania Atsu is constantly drawn toward a kind of shy romanticism; she is continually carried into dense, sunlit gardens full of kindness, warm-hearted, youthful bravado, and the promise of strange adventures. She painstakingly creates a microcosm governed by elegant grace, advertising her name—a microcosm we once loved in young age and will love even more deeply when our macrocosm begins to die, slowly.

Ania Atsu makes no claims against anyone, instructs no one, and curses no one. She does not quarrel with God, invent new aesthetics, nor explain the riddle of existence.

She simply offers—to all who wish to listen to her, or rather, to see her—here for the first time, perhaps—a little tender longing for what is constantly passing away, a pinch of feeling for the companions of our everyday fortune and misfortune, a drop of melancholic yet solid hope for a more cheerful tomorrow.

She extends her hand toward us, smeared with the dusty garden colours, askew with disproportionate lore.