The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Kora and Ka by H.D.
Irving Malin

H. D. Kora and Ka. New Directions, 1996. 102 pp. Paper: $7.00.

One of the intriguing questions raised by The Poet’s Story (edited by Howard Moss), Three Poems by John Ashbery, and The Doctor Stories by William Carlos Williams has never been answered. The question is raised again by these two texts. Why do poets write startling, wonderful prose? Are they attracted to precise images, to rhythmic perceptions because they view language as “magical”?

Although I do not admire the war poetry or the elaborate Egyptian excursions of H. D., I am fascinated by these two “long-short stories”—to use her description—and I believe they are masterpieces of nuance and “modes of consciousness.” The first, “Kora and Ka,” is divided into three sections. (H. D. was obsessed by trinities.) Each section is narrated by a shadowy consciousness, a “ghostly” presence. The narrator is less interested in plot than in interpretation of details. There is an elusive, hallucinatory quality. Ka (or shadow of the dead in Egyptian mythology) sees herself as a shadow of “Kora.” She sees “Helforth” (the husband of “Kora”) as another shadow. She is, indeed, alert to darkness and light. She gazes at Helforth who stares at the cows. We have vision of vision, an ever-shifting maze of perception. Ka says: “He sees the red cow placed at the shuttered window, like a cuckoo out of its clock. The cows are a trifle smaller than the two on wooden platforms that the patron’s small child pulls on uneven wood across the flagstones.” Perception is performance; perspective shifts; reality is “uneven.” And this process is repeated in the next two sections. Helforth, wounded by the death of his brother Larry, calls himself “I” or “he.” He is “in” and “out”: “I, John Helforth, go on existing in that beam of sunlight. As I stand now, stretching, the bar of light that underlined that triangle (sun-serpent) is exactly parallel to the threshold of the doorway. Parallels, parallels . . . are two things that travel along, equidistant, and never quite meet.” Movement yearns for “threshold,” for stability, for completion. But the third section offers no peace, no rest. The narrator is Ka or Helforth— or possibly Kora?—and there is great ambiguity suggested by such surprising imagery as this sequence: “The leaf is vertebrate. A flawless spine sends out side branches and those again break off into little veins. The flat young leaf blown sideways, insists on inference.” H. D. apparently suggests that reality is inference, that the “mind, just casually set in motion, discarded all the preconceived occupations of the mind.” The mind “trod ferris-wheel, trod old round of balance and account.” The mind is “smudged.”

The text of “Mira-Mare” is sunnier than the previous text. But although we have the happiness of Christian and Alex, we also find such imagery as “Bright flame shot up, slashed hole in casual memory” and the “rabid gash of hollyhock shaped hybiscus to show what red could be.”

“Kora,” “Ka,” “Mira,” “Mare,” “H. D.”: ambiguous, sudden bursts or, to use her words, “shrill-shrill-shrill (wind in telegraph wires). . . .” [Irving Malin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Kora and Ka by H.D. Irving Malin H. D. Kora and Ka. New Directions, 1996. 102 pp. Paper: $7.00. One of the intriguing questions raised by The Poet’s Story (edited by Howard Moss), Three Poems by John Ashbery, and The Doctor Stories by William Carlos Williams has never been answered. The question is raised again by these two texts. Why do poets write startling, wonderful prose? Are they attracted to precise images, to rhythmic perceptions because they view language as “magical”? Although I do not admire the war poetry or the elaborate Egyptian excursions of H. D., I am fascinated by these two “long-short stories”—to use her description—and I believe they are masterpieces of nuance and “modes of consciousness.” The first, “Kora and Ka,” is divided into three sections. (H. D. was obsessed by trinities.) Each section is narrated by a shadowy consciousness, a “ghostly” presence. The narrator is less interested in plot than in interpretation of details. There is an elusive, hallucinatory quality. Ka (or shadow of the dead in Egyptian mythology) sees herself as a shadow of “Kora.” She sees “Helforth” (the husband of “Kora”) as another shadow. She is, indeed, alert to darkness and light. She gazes at Helforth who stares at the cows. We have vision of vision, an ever-shifting maze of perception. Ka says: “He sees the red cow placed at the shuttered window, like a cuckoo out of its clock. The cows are a trifle smaller than the two on wooden platforms that the patron’s small child pulls on uneven wood across the flagstones.” Perception is performance; perspective shifts; reality is “uneven.” And this process is repeated in the next two sections. Helforth, wounded by the death of his brother Larry, calls himself “I” or “he.” He is “in” and “out”: “I, John Helforth, go on existing in that beam of sunlight. As I stand now, stretching, the bar of light that underlined that triangle (sun-serpent) is exactly parallel to the threshold of the doorway. Parallels, parallels . . . are two things that travel along, equidistant, and never quite meet.” Movement yearns for “threshold,” for stability, for completion. But the third section offers no peace, no rest. The narrator is Ka or Helforth— or possibly Kora?—and there is great ambiguity suggested by such surprising imagery as this sequence: “The leaf is vertebrate. A flawless spine sends out side branches and those again break off into little veins. The flat young leaf blown sideways, insists on inference.” H. D. apparently suggests that reality is inference, that the “mind, just casually set in motion, discarded all the preconceived occupations of the mind.” The mind “trod ferris-wheel, trod old round of balance and account.” The mind is “smudged.” The text of “Mira-Mare” is sunnier than the previous text. But although we have the happiness of Christian and Alex, we also find such imagery as “Bright flame shot up, slashed hole in casual memory” and the “rabid gash of hollyhock shaped hybiscus to show what red could be.” “Kora,” “Ka,” “Mira,” “Mare,” “H. D.”: ambiguous, sudden bursts or, to use her words, “shrill-shrill-shrill (wind in telegraph wires). . . .” [Irving Malin]

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