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Dance
in Odessa, written in English was first published in the USA in
2004, where Ilya Kaminsky with his family had been granted asylum. He was
born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1977. The book is unusual to anyone who has been
reading Arc’s translated poets: it has no editorial material and, aside from
a biographical note and acknowledgements, it’s all poetry. He is not
translated and has a clear, individual voice in English (American). Find him
on YouTube and it is likely to affect the way you read him on the page.
Heart and soul he seems ambivalently homesick, paying homage to, amongst
others, Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky and, amongst Europeans, to Isaac
Babel and Paul Celan; and there is a poem, ‘A Farewall to Friends / after
Nikolai Zabolotsky‘,
Yes, each man is a tower
of birds, I write my friends
into earth, into earth,
into earth.
There, with lantern in
hand,
a beetle-man greets his
acquaintances.
You stand in white hats,
long jackets,
with notebooks of poems,
you have for sisters wild
carnations,
nipples of lilacs,
splinters and chcickens.
Go now, I write as the
pages turn
to the shuffle of your
steps across the room.
I have referred to his performnce on YouTube: this poem is typical of what
also on the page has voice, has intense presence, does not stay still.
Intense while also, I would think, with humour. He needs to be represented by
whole poems, where humour, I suggest, a relishing of the job in hand, is
inherent in the very need to create. I say whole poems ideally, this is a
whole section of the several pages of ‘Musica Humana, an elegy for Osip
Mandelstam‘; it begins as if both beginning and continuing:
– the story is told of a
man who escapes
and is captured
into the prose of
evenings:
after making love, he
sits up
on a kitchen floor, eyes
wide open,
speaks of the Lord’s
emptiness
in whose image we are
made.
– he is out of work – among
silverware
and dirt he is kissing
his wife’s neck so the
skin of her belly tightens.
One would think of a boy
laying
syllables with his tongue
onto a woman’s skin:
there are lines
sewn entirely of silence.
When did I last encounter a book of poems that opened with a prayer? It is
complex, tortuous even, surprising and, as I sense his making of it,
necessary. And perhaps prayer haunts the whole book, through which there are
prose passages holding firm the
view steady, one might say, and the forms of the poems are variable to each’s
purpose. A section titled ‘Natalia’ begins with prose, has prose then running
under the pages of a long poem; the book’s title poem opens with image-making
meshing into autobiography,
We lived north of the
future, days opened
letters with a child’s
signtaure, a raspberry, a page of sky.
My grandmother threw
tomatoes
from her balcony, she
pulled imagination like a blanket
over my head. I painted
my mother’s face. She
understood
loneliness, hid the dead
in earth like partisans.
And so on for a page more. As reader, I go with the flow of the whole book,
am beguiled by the means, by the life of it, by presence. There’s an
adventure here and the poetry lives.
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In comparison, the
many more pages of Jay Ramsay’s Monuments are flat and
repetitive; far from engaging truly with the wider world or with any
immediacy of consequence, there is only a self-indulgence masquerading as
these purposes. Ilya Kaminsky’s prayer and the reach and depth of his book
are of a quite other order of connectedness, of its essence poetry.
Mysteriously yes, not exhausting but extending poetry’s presence in the real
world.
Monuments, on the other hand, reads as a gloss on everyday life, a
superficial sermonising, making easy use of religious languages – Christian,
Jewish, Sufi and of Gaia and of whatever else is around – and I dare say has
its adherents as erzatz spirituality, but merely put into short lines doesn’t
make it poetry.
There is a generalisation one might make about poetry in general, that there
is a superficiality when the track is laid too obviously in advance, which is
apparent here; nothing appears discovered in the act of writing, the ego
trips: a sameness of voice and tone, language and shape throughout. Here is
the whole of ‘Faith’, part of a sequence called ‘Summerland (2010)’,
How do ships lose their
way?
Foresaking their guiding
star
converging with
icebergs…
The church’s tower mast
re-faced
the wall rebuilt with its
fragments
of Roman brick and string
coursing
the dividing wall taken
down inside
along with the keystone
of the arch
re-set askew, so that
nothing
after all is quite
straight –
only a Roman road
but not the road of
faith.
If you want this kind of thing, where the poet is always right and making
sure we know it, do buy this fat book. But it has no place in the great
traditions of religious poetry – from across the faiths – where there has
been subtlety, uncertainty, fearfulness, humility, a desire to understand
what is hard to find.
Compare R.S.Thomas, Fawzi Karim, Michael Longley, David Scott, Amarjit
Chandan, Abdellatif La‰bi, Gillian Allnutt and Wendy Mulford, where in their
various ways poetry asks questions, arises for some not necessarily from
stock ‘religious’ language, all engaging with what might be found, perhaps.
And I turn again to John Donne, amongst others, whose great poetry cried out
uncertainty.
This present book makes statements, supplies doctrinal punch lines. A poem
titled ‘Day Twenty One’, for instance, ends, ‘War and peace – peace and war,/
the polarity like a metronome / snaking in its trance of duality // until we
get to the love beyond either’. Another (‘The Bridge’) ends, ‘… finding the
one journey that has meaning/ which is God finding us finding God/ in our own
soul.’ It is cod mystical.
The predictable response to such criticism ias I am making here is that the
maker of it doesn’t understand or is afraid of it or is sadly immune to what
(in such poems) is being said. There is no way out of this cycle of poem and
response and response to that. For myself, I don’t trust someone who at every
turn is so sure they know; and the poetry it inevitably produces is
second-rate.
© David Hart
2014
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