If Movement Was a Language by Svetlana Sterlin
months curve into each other
like laps, easy to mistake
for one another. as easy
to mistake as adulthood
for adolescence
~ ‘Orbit’, p.86
If Movement Was a Language (2024) is the debut collection from the quiet literary powerhouse that is Svetlana Sterlin. Sterlin has slowly but diligently made her mark as editor of swim meet lit mag, a widely published poet, and winner of several impressive accolades, including the 2023 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award.
This collection combines themes and a stylistic overtone that anyone familiar with her work will recognise. Born in New Zealand to Russian/Jewish parents, Sterlin’s poetry draws on her passion for and experiences as a professional swimmer and swim coach to consider ideas of displacement, dispossession, and what it means to consider (or not) a place as ‘home.’
My parents call this place uncultured. This place
where local cuisine is Vegemite and hot dogs.
but our culture can’t claim any cuisine
…
Never the food of my birth country, nor my home
country, nor the ones in between. Is it culture
to be of so many places or to be of none?
~ ‘Lack of Culture’, p. 68
Divided into five parts, Sterlin explores different aspects of her own and her family's identity and what it means to be immigrants in Australia. Titles such as ‘Foreign,’ ‘Odd,’ and ‘Alien’ clue us into the overarching impact of this experience. As one might expect, water, movement through water, and the evocative imagery and metaphors this brings forth are present throughout much of the collection:
on frigid pool deck we assume our positions:
well rehearsed routine of peeling of blankets,
freeing smoky tendrils to rise into ripening sky
~ ‘day : night = night : sky’, p.26
Nostalgia is another important theme, especially around ideas of misremembered youth, girlhood, and emergence into adult/womanhood. She reflects on early lost loves, friendships, and the bitter-sweet rememberings of time spent around water and swimming pools:
something we did well
was talk. about nothing,
babble like the patter
of rain on the pool.
all those familiar
sounds. now the thunder
booms like an echo
of those days.
~ ‘Summer Taper’, p. 49
Sterlin navigates the delicate space between memory and the passage of time, capturing the tension of being young enough to feel the weight of past experiences yet beginning to distance herself from them. Her work has a quiet unease as she reflects on the deceit of time – how it distorts memory, blurring the sharpness of early moments and leaving behind an ache of uncertainty. This questioning fuels an ongoing excavation of self as if she’s digging into her past to unearth truths that may have been buried, altered, or forgotten.
The theme of loss also runs deep in Sterlin's work, particularly in her exploration of her father's redundancy and the imagined lives that could have unfolded. There is a strong undercurrent of what ifs. This is particularly evident in the image of Russian supermarkets closing, as explored in ‘Lack of Culture,’ where Sterlin touches on the erosion of cultural touchstones. Closing these stores symbolises more than just a loss of convenience – it’s the fading of a familiar world, a piece of identity slipping away in multiple ways, a reminder for what is left behind:
Months elapse before Mama’s passport
is approved. Borders open
and a war ensues.
…
I almost made this
another poem about swimming
but words aren’t always poems.
Somewhere, someone folds
my grandmother’s limbs
across her body.
~ ‘Grandmother’s Limbs’, p.106
Sterlin seems to grapple with finding a new language, a new way to understand her identity, which she symbolically explores through swimming. In the water, she seems to search for a fluid, adaptive self – a way of moving through loss and change without being drowned by it, finding solace in transformation and the search for new forms of belonging.
I didn't learn to swim
the water learned to hold me.
~ ‘Elegy For the Swim Teacher I Never Had’, p.9
This collection will resonate deeply with anyone who has struggled with finding their sense of place in a foreign world – in whatever context that might show up as – and with the unexpected ways we might seek and ultimately find refuge. I am excited to see how Sterlin develops as a poet in her future work.
Read our interview with Svetlana here!
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com.
