In an empty store, dancing among stands with Sweets shop–except for her lovers and my neighbors (who steal milk chocolate in I want her to imagine our scandalous days in Odessa when we will open a small Section three, “Natalia,” is a sequence of love poems. These, as much as Odessa itself, are home for him. This is the first of poetic touchstones, odes, Kaminsky writes to his great influences. The second section, first published as a chapbook, is “Musica Humana: an Elegy for Osip Mandelstam,” about the great Russian poet who was oppressed (as were a few million others) by Stalin’s regime. This is how we live on earth, a flock of sparrows.īehind our ears. This section is pretty bleak, as it depicts an oppressive regime, though there is also this: It’s what one can expect of a first book by a poet who left his home town and country to live in the U.S. The first, “Dancing in Odessa,” is about war and his home in the Ukraine. The collection is composed of five sections. Odessa was named with Odysseus in mind, an explorer's gift, a writer's treasure, in some ways. Into my hand: Little book, go to the city without me. Whitening their bodies: mother, father dancing, moving Took a handful of snow, put it in my mouth. The German tanks on tractors, I kept a suitcase fullĪt night, I woke to whisper: yes, we lived. At this, my doctor laughed, his granddaughterĪnd my classmate invented twenty names for Jew. Its pulse) my mother danced, she filled the past Loneliness, hid the dead in the earth like partisans. Letters with a child’s signature, a raspberry, a page of sky.įrom her balcony, she pulled imagination like a blanket We lived north of the future, days opened I found this first volume on the whole wonderful, reading it through slowly once, then again and again. Loving her is simple as putting raspberriesĭancing in Odessa is the first full book of poems (there was a chapbook, and there are several other books on related topics, collections with others) from Ilya Kaminsky the second, Deaf Republic, I also read and reviewed here recently. Then my mother begins to dance, re-arranging

Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky