Love Ilya. ( )

Utterly transcendent! Ilya Kaminsky IS poetry. ( )

This poetry collection is a celebration? recognition? of Kaminsky's Ukrainian past. He and his family immigrated to the US when he was 16 and they were granted asylum. This book, published 11 years later, seems to be his first foray into English poetry. He references many Ukrainian poets of the early-to-mid 20th century (who often were born in places now in the Ukraine that were in Russia or Romania at the time they were born), and one Italian poet is also referenced.

I had to look up all of these people because Joseph Brodsky was the only one I had heard of and I have read none of them (but I will be reading Eugenio Montale soon). Most/all of the Ukrainians suffered greatly during the Russian Revolution of World War I, most dying around age 50. But the poems with these poets names as titles go a little over my head--I haven't read their poetry and my knowledge about them comes from wikipedia articles. I feel like readers need to have a background with all of these other poets to understand these poems.

There is a lot of dancing, Odessa, Natalia, Aunt Rose, mentions of deafness. Kaminsky's second collection is Deaf Republic, which I loved, and on page 5 of this work he writes "My secret: at the age of four I became deaf." Is this "I" he the poet? Or a character? Or a representation of someone else?

So, mostly I felt a little lost here. I certainly learned a lot by reading about the people he references. I did very much like the poem Musica Humana, the second half of which is built around a fascinating and terrifying idea. ( )

This is the platonic ideal of poetry. He lets his imagery do the work, not only within the individual poems but throughout the collection. There is beauty, sorrow, love, grief--all conveyed in exquisite, simple and profound poems. ( )

Ilya Kaminsky constructs a history for the land of his youth. It is an ancestral tapestry that is literary as well as personal, reaching back past aunts and uncles to Mandelstam and Brodsky. He exacts these goals with humility all the while exerting a musicality of language imbued with the fervor of prophecy and powerful imagery bordering on dream. A striking debut collection from a dynamic and wanted voice. ( )