Review of Almost Bluing for X-tra Whiteness Timothy Gager Poems

 Review of Almost Bluing for X-tra Whiteness

Timothy Gager Poems

Big Table Publishing, 2024

73 pages

by Lo Galluccio

Is the title ironic? Is it meant to mimic a toothpaste or detergent commercial? X-tra Whiteness suggests not race in this book, but some kind of gleam. Or maybe Gager is playing on the theme of whiteness, and even including race. After several readings, I’m still not sure but the title, it’s pop and its ambiguity, drew me to this collection, without a doubt.

The book’s divided into four sections, the first “Blue” contains poems most of which are elegiac poems to loss: the loss of a pure, true love, the death of his beloved father, its blue meaning bereft, blue as in the blues, to be blue, sad, as Nick Cave mentions in his lecture on love songs like the Portuguese word saudade. Here is tangible sorrow, even desolation, a sense that the world has broken apart into a void. In “Dependents” Gager posits that rescue when it comes, comes too late to save anybody. “Listen/smother me with a pillow/Don’t worry, no one will come/…/and when they finally come…it’ll be too late.” p. 11. In “After You Go” he writes: “we send to the sky our grief/when writing letters/to the deceased.” p 13. This affirms both the sense of futility and awe that accompanies a close relative or friend’s passing. Certainly, a testament to mortality and our inability to stop death. And later, “No one makes/our longings/into a song.” There seems no compensation, no silver lining to this black cloud. There is a nostalgic poem to three past New Year’s Eves with the lost partner, now gone: 2020, 2021 and 2022, where in a Cape Cod Airbnb it begins to drizzle, “right before the sky fell down.” p 17. Gager deftly deals in worldly concrete specifics, often juxtaposed with more abstract forces, nature, the sky. In 1/1 he insists that his love is “one of one” and that since they no longer converse, “…I no longer recite.” p 19. A sense of mute longing that is however, undercut by the playful, imaginative language with which Gager crafts these “blue” poems. They are, as he writes in “It Sunk” “…my best pieces, /wreckage after implosion.” p 23.

Part 2, is a shorter section entitled “X-tra-White.” It begins with a poem called, “Reflections: A 17 Year old Drug Addict 40 Years Later,” a meditation on getting clean and losing bad habits of addiction, a little shoplifting, badmouthing others which amount to an “empty echo of lunacy –” and the harsh violence or violated foundation “struck, strike, striking,/of permanence.” The addict recovers through an act of faith as God is summoned and gives one more chance, so the addict “started to clean.” p 29. This is an ode to recovery without going into the painful steps sobriety requires. In contrast, in a combative mood, there is indulgent excess that is a “reply to someone who said, there’s a lot of selfish going around here.” In response to this reprimand, the narrator licks sweet syrup and heaps on bacon, “sticking my tongue directly on/the sizzle of a steak.” When something is stolen from us sometimes our impulse is to steal more from the world, in a desperate and seemingly justifiable greed, “I’m waiting to eat more/of what the world owes me.” He wants, “More/Bring it/Some more.” p. 31. Dunno, is Gager suggesting that X-tra whiteness in\our society means, addiction/recovery/country music/abuse/death…some of the themes in this section. He ends this part with a “found” poem that takes excerpts from Twitter, In Their Own Words on NYE, 2022, drawing upon the tweets of female public personas that

range from Michelle Obama (On Knitting) to Marjorie Taylor Greene (Saying Stupid as Fuck Things) to Margaret Atwood (On New Year’s Day)-- the kind of piece that gives us verifiable documentation of the way social media voices can scream at us for good or ill.

In Part 3, “Re(a)d” Gager moves into a more redemptive sequence of poems on matters of the heart. The first, title poem plays with the homophones, “red” and “read” and suggests that we read or interpret that bold valentine of love in a hypnotic, playful way. There is rhythmic music to it: “heart/red red/heart/red red/heart/red/heart/red.” p 44. Here is something almost primal about how fragile and trancelike a beating heart is. In “Picturing One Great Love” the poet pines to paint a portrait of the beloved and ends with the plea, “Can I finish one drawing/Please…just one?” p. 45 Longing can trick us with its endless myriad tugs, no matter how clearly we see and want the vanished love object to materialize. And there is also a coming to terms with the reality of not possessing-- the sanity of it-- by acknowledging our lack of control. In “Acceptance Poem” he pens an ode to serenity, a concept familiar to many recovered addicts (or members of 12 step programs of all kinds.) As he puts it: “A goal is to have no expectations/Please accept this distance/a gift, where serenity lives/as prospects crucified us.” p 51 Same as prey he suggests we survive with grace like birds, “hummingbirds, bluejays, sparrows and finches.” There is poignant beauty in the poem “Into the Silent Sea” where “the moon was not full today;/it was shaped like a heart,/seen from the bottom, light diffracted,/in a way that made you nauseous…/ that sickness that a state of isolation brings as he still feels “like an incredible ship/sunken and abandoned.” p 47. This section ends with a poem for which Gager was nominated for a Pushcart prize, a narrative poem about a visit to Star Island in 2024 that juxtaposes the calm beauty of a “white gull, blue water/the calmness of the completed” with the brutal excavation for a grave back home. The piece ends with a moment of seemingly perfect harmony though, a bird joining the choir by the sea, and the poet’s astonishment that “a piece of congruence, /swiftly the flash of/” could be real. “Damn, it can be,” he asserts.

The final section, “Blu-ing, as distinct from the first section, “Blue,” is where the poet takes on other themes, objects, even humor. It’s as if “Blu-ing” were the poet’s ability to compensate for or distract from the underlying grief by looking at the world with some jauntiness and resilience. It begins with “Abecedarius,” in compressed form, a poem whose lines copy the sequence of the alphabet. Only this one is just seven lines, that run from letters A to X, a lovely mysterious piece that lives “under voracious waters,/xeric, your zone.” Someone, and I forget who, said that a few poems should contain exotic or unfamiliar words, so I looked up “xeric,” and it means arid. With the big currents turned back, the poet is dwelling in a paradoxically safe, dry space, under a deluge. The poems “Almost Famous” and “Literary Action Figures” give us some comical relief; the first about how Boston’s so called famous eating joints are actually not known outside of the locale and the second is a look back to childhood toys and a sibling spat about a Barbie whose hair is pulled out, and a “Bukowski doll” and the favorite, a Kurt Vonnegut figure, who defies his sick sister’s destructive tendencies. Real or fictional it gives some insight into the writer’s psychic literary pantheon. In “Recipe Dumb-Ass Men Use to Cook Women” Gager catalogues the obnoxious ways men can turn off women in their ego-centric stupidity, including lying and “proclaiming distaste toward/ the dirty bourgeoise./ p. 69. A simple fave of mine is the closing poem, a list poem called, “Things You Find in Miami Beach,” that includes “a hairless cat” and “Hot as fuck/white/sand.” In the end, he leaves us with a slice of the world, an ode to escape on a popular Florida beach.

This is a marvelously composed collection that includes both the sacred and the profane. It’s about love, loss, mortality, addiction, recovery and survival and it’s both a good time read and enlightening literature about the state of our humanity. From the particle of deep loss to a wider field of understanding and acceptance, Gager takes us on a carefully executed poetic journey that leaves us wiser and well sated. I’ve frankly missed out on a lot of Tim’s fiction work, but I’m very happy to have found this, his latest offering. I feel both alive and awakened by it.

Review of Leopoldstadt, a play by Tom Stoppard

 

Leopoldstadt

Review of Leopoldstadt, a play by Tom Stoppard

At the Huntington Theatre through October 13, 2024

By Andy Hoffman

Tom Stoppard has said that Leopoldstadt might be his final play. The production of it at the Huntington Theater, running through October 13, 2024, gives us reason to celebrate and reflect on the playwright’s accomplishments. From his first hit, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1966, through his most recent work – with important side journeys into film, such as Brazil and Shakespeare in Love (for which he won an Oscar) – Stoppard has challenged directors and audiences with his intellectual slapstick, jumps from reality to fantasy, splices of chronology, and productions seemingly too large for the stage. In Leopoldstadt, Stoppard explores his family history, but with all the elements that have made his plays essential viewing.

Stoppard has transferred his family from Zlin, Czechoslovakia to Vienna, Austria, which gives him the broad canvas he loves. Beginning in the 1860s, Vienna became an artistic and intellectual magnet, providing a launching pad for excellence in diverse fields. Home to Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, and Gustav Mahler, Vienna drew people and perspectives from across the Habsburg empire. Approximately ten percent of Vienna was Jewish, and Jews wielded disproportionate influence in universities, in the arts, and in society. Although still excluded from full and equal participation in public life, Viennese Jews led and inspired Austrian culture. Stoppard, who only learned at age 57 of his own Jewish roots, reimagines his family in the political and artistic milieu of Vienna, where secular Jews often adopted Christianity, married out of their tribe, and endeavored to mix completely into Austrian society. Leopoldstadt is a multi-generational family drama, in which the largely Jewish family is buffeted about through history. Despite their accomplishments, their friends, and their individual efforts to pass beyond social barriers, in the end Nazis determine who is Jewish and who is not, who is worthy of full citizenship in Austria, and who will find themselves in the ashpit of Auschwitz. Stoppard’s parents had the good fortune to escape, though his father died on the circuitous route to England, and he was himself raised as an Englishman, full stop. Most of his family, like most of the family we meet in Leopoldstadt, fall victim to the Holocaust.

Directed by Carey Perloff, who helmed the superb Lehman Trilogy last season, this production of Leopoldstadt handles Stoppard’s dramatic pyrotechnics adroitly. In the first scene, for example, the entire family appears on stage for a Christmas gathering, almost twenty characters crowding the stage with music, dancing, and family quarrels as we focus in on small groups chatting about art, politics, and religion. The scene could devolve into a confusing mess, but the Huntington’s actors, following Perloff masterful direction, keep the action moving throughout. The drama focuses on Hermann’s attempt to navigate Vienna’s turbulence with money and connections. He converts, marries a Christian, and truly believes he will ride out the tide of history. He learns, after attempting to satisfy his honor through a duel, that members of the class he aspires to won’t even deign to kill the descendent of a Jew in pursuit of honor. Only then does he, and the audience, begin to fully realize how impossible fighting the tide will become. Stoppard uses the well-known story of the rise of Nazism to point out the dangerous times we live in now. Toward the end of the play, when we meet the few survivors in the fourth generation of the family we meet in the first scene, one of the characters representing the English Stoppard observes that the Holocaust could never happen again. The audience knows better and gasps audibly. We have seen almost the entire family obliterated, generation after generation, before we can clearly distinguish individual members, more expendable Jews than remarkable people.

Brave and ambitious as it is, Leopoldstadt does not quite reach the stratospheric heights of Travesties or Arcadia, but it reminds us that we have enjoyed the inestimable privilege of sharing the earth with Tom Stoppard. As Ludwig, the family mathematician, uses a cat’s cradle to explain the hidden relationships between events discernable only through study and intellect, we recognize and thank Stoppard for helping us in our struggle to understand the extent to which people choose cruelty. Extraordinary performances by Nael Nacer as Hermann and Firdous Bamji as his cousin Ludwig anchor the picture of the family, even as they disappear under the waves of the twentieth century. The costumes, set design, lighting and sound also help pull together this complex family portrait. I encourage you to see Leopoldstadt and embrace the sweep of language and history Tom Stoppard brings to life.

Red Letter Poem #225

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.



––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Dear Readers: I’ll be taking a two-week hiatus for some travel and work commitments.

I will be back with a new Red Letter on October 18th. I trust, in the meantime, you’ll be busily making your own red-letter days.



Red Letter Poem #225



The Lindesfarne Manuscript 

Lamp-black for letters,

light sinking before him,

no wonder the monk believed

the world would end

in a whisper of fire.

Under the nib, the vellum

flexed like a woman’s soft arm,

the Gospels an elaborate tattoo.

In the cemetery, the stones

lay strewn like petals in moonlight.



Now we admire it under glass

and light candles only

for romance or hurricanes.

We trim black wick and write little

on paper. No wonder we believe

the world won’t last forever,

although in cities not our own

we throw coins into bright fountains,

hold hands and stare at night sky.





––Jack Stewart







Let me remind you of two tropes that have become familiar from novels and movies. The first: a medieval monk, laboring at his work table by candlelight, transcribing a holy manuscript. Such an endeavor represents the archetypical image of knowledge transmitted: gloriously, painstakingly, entirely by hand––long before the printing press would facilitate that process and make books accessible to more than society’s elite. If you have ever stood before one of the masterpieces of illuminated art––the Book of Kells is perhaps the most famous example in the West, originating in 9th century Ireland, but there are pieces of immense beauty stemming from the Persian tradition, the Hebrew, the Chinese, and beyond––it’s likely that you, too, were mesmerized by the intense spiritual practice that went into producing a single book. Today’s Red Letter poet, Jack Stewart, remembers seeing the Lindisfarne Gospels, a breathtaking leather-bound volume, assumed to be the creation of a single monk named Eadfrith, working at an 8thcentury island monastery off the coast of Northumberland. All that is known, believed, cherished can––within such a magnificent creation––be passed on from one set of eyes to another. But the second trope is considerably darker: it imagines some unspecified time in the near or distant future, perhaps following a cataclysmic event, where books have all but vanished––and those few that still hold to the sanctity of the written word are regarded like wizards, keepers of an arcane knowledge which the greater populace has long since abandoned. (I’m imagining fans of novels like Fahrenheit 451 or visual narratives like Game of Thrones, are smiling knowingly right now.)



I’m hoping Jack’s poetic voice will not feel unfamiliar to Red Letter readers; he has become a regular presence in these virtual pages. His educational roots extend from the University of Alabama and Emory University to the Georgia Institute of Technology where he became a Brittain Fellow. His debut collection, No Reason, appeared in the Poeima Poetry Series in 2020. He’s been widely published in literary journals like Poetry, the New York Quarterly, and the Iowa Review, and numerous poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He now directs the Talented Writers Program at the Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale where he works to initiate young minds into our literary brother/sisterhood.



Did you feel, as I did, that Jack’s poem both references those two tropes and quietly subverts them? When he describes the vellum as “flexed like a woman’s soft arm,” and the Gospels as “an elaborate tattoo” on this supple calfskin page, the tone is a far cry from what we expect of that celibate friar. The medieval scribe quickly morphs into a contemporary one, lamenting how those flickering candles are used now only for romance or power failures. “We…write little on paper,” Jack himself writes (initially in the pages of his notebook)––and perhaps you too winced to be reminded that this very text was being conveyed to your attention via electrons dancing across some lit screen. Are you thinking the mystique of the reading/writing experience has been diminished or enhanced by modern technology? I found myself nodding in agreement when the poet wrote: “No wonder we believe/ the world won’t last forever,/ although”––and that simple conjunction turns the emotional vector of this poem in yet another direction––although we still find ourselves journeying to foreign lands (often accompanied, not surprisingly, by our beloved partners), seeking wisdom, beauty, or at least the possibility that such things still exist. And so, as our contemporary headlines grow darker by the day (and do you even subscribe anymore to some inky broadsheet? or are current events delivered solely via the conglomerated pixels of electronic news?) you too might feel the desire to make a wish upon some exotic fountain. As the poem suggests: hold hands with someone you love, raise your eyes to the vastness of the night sky. That plopping sound may be the lucky coin breaking the watery surface; or perhaps it’s the plangent heartbeat a good poem can stimulate. Doubtless, it’s our quiet imaginations that are suddenly illuminated.

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on Twitter           

@StevenRatiner

The Bagel

A day in the life.... I usually leave my home in Somerville around 5:30 AM, because my classes start at 8AM, and I like to get my work finished, and chew the fat with a colleague of mine. Now most who know me associate me with bagels and poetry. I discovered years ago that there was a Finagle-a Bagel on campus. And Finagle-a-Bagel was the first place the Bagel Bards literary group met In Harvard Square some 20 years ago. Anyway.. for the last 15 years I have been getting a whole wheat bagel ( a concession to age) with tomato and hummus. On a Tuesday, I walked in the shop, and they had everything prepared for me in advance. I assume this a great campus honor-- my ritual, my hunger for this doughy treat, my Stendhal Syndrome Swoon in the face of its beauty. The counterwomen said ( laughing)" If you call in sick...you must notify us." I told my dean about this, and he laughed, " Doug you have finally arrived." Excuse me...I think my bagel is waiting for me.

Women and Children First by Alina Grabowski, Zando Books, New York, 320 pages. $16.99

 

Women and Children First by Alina Grabowski, Zando Books, New York, 320 pages. $16.99.

Review by Ed Meek

A creative literary take on the mystery novel

In Egypt when someone dies, relatives hire professional mourners to help the family and friends grieve. Jews sit shiva for seven days after the death of a close one. For many of us though, there is a funeral mass and service. Then, we are expected to get on with our lives. Alina Grabowski delves into the way women in a small town process the tragic death of a high school girl.

In an interview with a local journalist, Ali Goad, in Austin, Texas, Grabowski describes her novel as exploring “how a community processes a tragedy … focusing on “the complexities of memory.” The novel is written from the points of view of ten women, each of whom gets her own chapter. The first five chapters lead up to and include the death of Lucy, a high school student, and the last five chapters deal with the aftermath. Each of the women has a connection to the main character. The chapters function like long short stories that are cleverly linked. Each chapter is a mini-mystery: who is this person and how is she linked to Lucy? The novel is a kind of giant puzzle with the pieces fitted together as you read along.

The advantage of novels with multiple points of view is that we are introduced to a number of characters rather than stuck with one voice. Although Holden Caufield of The Catcher in the Rye starts out as a very entertaining narrator, after a hundred pages, the reader begins to get sick of him calling everyone a phony. On the other hand, what happens with multiple points of view is that we find ourselves drawn to some characters more than others. Grabowski is a talented writer who creates the voices of a range of women, from teenagers to forty-something moms. However, she is more convincing with teens and young women than she is with the older ones.

Grabowski says that although the novel focuses on a mystery it is “primarily literary fiction.” As a result, the emphasis is on character, not plot. “Great character makes great fiction,” the writer Bill Kittredge once said and Grabowski is skilled at creating character. In her attempt to make the novel realistic, she often undercuts what would be climaxes in other novels. Grabowski often backs away from conflict giving us characters that are compelling but what happens is sometimes a letdown.

My favorite character is Mona, a caustic thirty-year-old who is living in the house her mother left her and working in a bar. She has great lines like: “If only I could look at everything in life and know its interior contents. I would have dated significantly fewer musicians.” Another strong character Marina describing a high school girl, says, “She smiles with the innocent menace teenage girls have been perfecting for centuries. What an age! To be so convinced of your allure and so ignorant of its consequences.” These are the kinds of insights that make fiction so enjoyable. Maureen, the principal of the high school says,” But a girl and a child are not the same. A child is a pet. A girl is prey.”

The characters all react differently to the death of Lucy. Many are trying to get away from the problems engendered by the tragedy. Two high school mates of hers literally run while her mother doesn’t want to face or even find out what really happened.

Grabowski has her thumb on the current zeitgeist with compelling women who each have power in their own world and who are often reacting to men who disappear or let them down.

There’s an embarrassing viral video that may have caused Lucy to take risks she might not otherwise have engaged in. The title, of course, is a reference to the Titanic. At the beginning of the book, an epigraph tells us that the only reason that they say “Women and children first” is to test the strength of the lifeboats. Alina Grabowski’s promising and well-written debut novel is well worth diving into.

Poet Ellen Steinbaum finds beauty in simplicity

Recently, I caught up with poet Ellen Steinbaum to interview her about her new collection, LEAVINGS.


Steinbaum wrote me:



"Leavings is my fifth collection and I’ve also written a one-person play. My work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and is included in anthologies including Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems, American Places; The Widows’ Handbook; A Mighty Room: A Collection of Poems Written in Emily Dickinson’s Bedroom; and CavanKerry’sWaiting Room Reader II. An award-winning journalist and former Boston Globe columnist, I write a blog, “Reading and Writing and the Occasional Recipe” which can be found at my web site, ellensteinbaum.com."




This is the final poem in Leavings:


“The Intervening Day” we call it:

the day between his birthday and our
anniversary, between the beginning of
his days and the formal beginning of our
days together, between these two occasions
for cards and cakes, good wishes, celebrations,
this one day that has no ritual, just
an everyday day, a day we notice perhaps only
because it sits sandwiched between the two
momentous ones, a day when nothing further
is required than our simple gratitude for
one more ordinary day.

Poet Charles Coe wrote of your poetry collection that your poetry evokes "profound truths in the smallest, quite corners" Could one say you find the profound in the mundane—the minutiae?

I love that Charles said that. I hadn’t thought about that but, yes, it feels right. Though I admire poets who can wrestle with huge subjects and bring them into a scale for human observation, I think I am more comfortable with the very small thing that might almost escape notice.



Your lead poem " Commitment" deals with all things-- cockroaches. You have a knack for seeing the ugly/beauty—the romantic gloss of this roach couple?​

I think “ick—cockroach”—but I did like learning that these creatures I consider loathsome actually have this behavior I find—write it—charming!



Regarding your poem about the doomed Donner Party, I can't help but think of Donald Trump – a ham-fisted, carnival barker and snake oil salesman, who leads his hapless flock to their death.

Exactly what I hoped you’d think of, including the happy coincidence of the two names.



In your poem " What Happiness Is?," you explore the ''limp gifts"—the little things-- that are indeed consequential in a relationship. This brings us back to the profundity of minutiae.

Yes. What I was thinking of here was how, when we are lucky enough to spend our days with someone we care about, the tiniest observations become little “gifts” of noticing to offer for sharing. Noticing is something I’ve written about specifically, because noticing is what poets need to do—right?--in order to find something worth turning into metaphor, worth thinking about.



Do you feel your years as a journalist informs your poetry?

I’m sure they do. When I turned to poetry it was out of a desire to say something in a way I couldn’t do in prose, but I think it’s all of a piece, different ways of putting into words and sharing what I find interesting.


Why should we read your book?

There’s a wonderful line by Willa Cather: there are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.


I really believe that’s true—we each have our own details, but the basic outlines of our stories are easily recognizable to one another. And I think the more our individual stories are told with our specific details, the easier they are for someone else to see their own stories in. And isn’t that what we all crave, especially after a lockdown that isolated us from one another and societal divisions of all kinds—a point of connection, of commonality? My story—or the things I’ve noticed enough to bring into my poems—are mine, but I think others can find themselves in what I’ve noticed and written about, and then maybe feel connected to others through that.

Red Letter Poem #224

  The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #224

 

 

 

 

 

***





the villas, sister, are all empty—on a spring ray, like on a spit
we don’t turn against men’s gazes indiscreet, thirsty
there’ve been so many disasters in the twentieth century

with all of us that

none of us has managed to retain her
childish illusions, girlish dreams, pink slumbers



the villas, sister, are looted, every other one
shame our kind mothers didn’t teach us how to survive a war,
occupation, deportation, Holodomor, GULAG
taught us instead to close our eyes when the path is bloodied
leave someone’s body spread out, stretched out, your-my body
before the face of abuse, o man, Lord, are you here?



the villas, sister, are being rebuilt, everything will be forgotten,

albeit not at once, someday
our sons will grow up, they will trust strength more than us
our daughters, graceful as deer, resilient as Kevlar,
stronger than steel, let them not be applied to wounds,
let them not even be grateful to us, to their wicked mothers





––Halyna Kruk







Considering that Vladimir Putin has declared repeatedly that both the idea of an independent Ukraine and its proud cultural legacy are simply ‘fictions,' he’s certainly expended an astonishing tonnage of munitions––not to mention the lives of countless Russian troops––in trying to obliterate what he claims does not exist. The awful toll of dead and wounded within Ukraine is well-documented; but organizations, from within that nation and beyond, have also been assiduously documenting the cultural genocide being perpetrated. UNESCO has verified the damage or destruction of 438 cultural sites in Ukraine since the invasion began, including: 142 churches or religious centers; 215 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest; 32 museums; 32 monuments;16 libraries; and 1 archive––the majority of these being intentionally targeted, a violation of the Geneva Accords. Looting of art and significant cultural artifacts has been widespread as well. Ihor Poshyvailo, co-founder of the Heritage Emergency Response Initiative, said: “This is a war against our historical memory. . .against our soul, against everything that makes us Ukrainian.” But the aggressors are discovering that this ongoing war crime has only strengthened the resolve of these beleaguered people––and intensified the attention on Ukrainian poets and artists worldwide.



Halyna Kruk is one of the bright lights in the Ukrainian literary firmament––a poet, translator, educator, and literary critic. In addition, she writes award-winning children’s fiction, translated into 15 languages. A professor of literary studies at the National University of Lviv, she served previously as vice-president of the Ukrainian branch of PEN, the international writer’s organization. The conflict in her homeland has only magnified the global interest in her work. Today’s poem is taken from Lost in Living (Lost Horse Press, 2024) a brand-new bilingual edition of her poetry, translated with tremendous sensitivity by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky. One of numerous untitled pieces in the collection, it is a lament for the hard truth that non-combatants, like women and children, often suffer the most when war becomes the tyrant’s method of pursuing his insidious objectives.



“shame our kind mothers didn’t teach us how to survive a war,/ occupation, deportation, Holodomor, GULAG”, Halyna writes, a line that quite simply makes the heart ache. She questions why parents and the broader community encouraged women to demurely “close our eyes when the path is bloodied.” But now Ukrainian civilians of every possible background are being schooled in the lessons of wanton destruction, an aggressor’s unbridled malice. Yet they are demonstrating the sort of courage and national resolve that ought to make every other democratic people examine their own commitment to remain free. Sweeping in with minimal punctuation, Halyna’s poems often combine a sort of relaxed conversational tone with sudden nightmarish turns and startling shifts in perception. When she terms it “your-my body,” lying bloody in the path, we readers will have a hard time maintaining a safe distance from the unfolding events. And when, near the conclusion, she adds: “our sons will grow up, they will trust strength more than us/ our daughters, graceful as deer, resilient as Kevlar”, I imagine that many of us will look up from the page and consider, for a moment, how well we’ve provided for our own children’s well-being. Have we the fortitude to be one of those “wicked” parents, honestly schooling them in the real dimensions of this dangerous world? Of course, as this war has sadly demonstrated, neither poets, mothers nor their children are in fact made of Kevlar––but the poems themselves may yet prove to be resistant to the bullets and bombs of invading armies. If they are embraced by the voices, the imaginations of readers who can appreciate their honesty, this constitutes a kind of inviolable Ukraine––and even tyrants may run out of armaments before these stanzas can be expunged. Crying out in the poem: “o man, Lord, are you here?”––I, for one, am anxious to see who will finally answer that prayer.

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on Twitter           

@StevenRatiner