In “Delirium”, Skidan’s subject is the biblical story of Lot who God instructs to flee Sodom before the city is destroyed. Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt when she looks back at the destruction of the city. Lot flees to the desert, alone with his two daughters. Uncomprehending, the daughters believe it is the end of the world. That only procreation with their father will ensure the continuation of the human race. They get him drunk and seduce.

(…) the fading of the annihilated echo. lot,
falling like a stone in the oblivion of a sling,
conceives the unknown, led by
the degree of “fall;” the daughter enters him and again –
the daughter, another. A daughterly darkness, cascading down,
covers Israel;

A self contained ellipsis ushers in this velvet destruction of the echo creating a vacuum of sound. Throughout the poem, the echo will reappear – “[b]ut these dances by the fire fire.” Dance implies music but the only music is Lot’s drunkenness and incestuous sex. In the end, the annihilation of the echo will be complete. There will be no words in the last stanza, instead a series of dots representing words, lines left unspoken, silence.

Skidan uses his intellect as reflective armor. Each poem contains a riddle in which he confesses through masque. In the world of Red Shifting, characters from mythology, critical theory and literature coexist with Skidan’s intimates from contemporary St. Petersburg. At times these friends, acquaintances and civilians are signified by a single letter, at times by entire first names. The title poem, Red Shifting, is possibly the most direct poem in the collection. It is a day in the life, where the poet shifts in and out of conversation with those around him while observing and contemplating everyone that he encounters. He desires the cool G as they smoke cigarettes.

(I take out a cigarette, and before my eyes are these two
photographs; I want to forget them, want to see them, but in order
to forget them, I need to write about them, and in order to see
them – I need the opposite: to be with G.)

The poet plays with repetition but does not literally repeat himself. Skidan’s echo theme now plays out through doubling, or two-ness. Through the two photographs of the quote, then again in “I have two dead people on my hands.” Taking it further, Skidan introduces two-ness in love—Blok and Bely, both in love with Lyubov Dmitrievna, then The Sheltering Sky. This bread crumb trail moves away from G to the absent A. A may return and this possible return rattles the poet and again the dream-poem ends in silence, “The thought which I didn’t have the power to say out loud.”

In “Red Bridge”, and again in “Piercing of the Lower Lip”, it is San Francisco reflected across the Pacific Ocean as Vladivostok that the poet contemplates – “I heard a pacific newspaper rustle in the wind, and standing at the far end of Golden Gate Bridge…I saw Vladivostok.” Through poetry, Skidan allows himself to exist in two places, at two points in time with the Pacific Ocean serving as an enormous mirror warped by distance. This writing from an intentionally distorted perspective is what Dragomoshchenko refers to as Skidan “building a backward mirror.” But there is another mirror, the mirror of translation. Principal translator Genya Turovskaya, has successfully created a mirror image in English of Skidan’s careful and intentional Russian language while preserving Skidan’s uniquely erudite voice peppered with controlled bursts of vulgarity. Retaining Skidan’s love of vocabulary rooted in Latin, Turovskaya’s translations are astute echoes, clear reflections containing microscopic detail.

Alexandr Skidan was awarded the St. Petersburg-based Andrei Bely Prize in 2006 for the Russian edition of Red Shifting.

By Alexandr Skidan
Translated by Genya Turovskaya
Ugly Duckling Presse
170 pgs, $15.00

Maria –
Don’t you want me?
You don’t want me!
“A Cloud in Pants” (p. 103), Vladimir Mayakovsky

Big man with a big voice, Futurist, prisoner in solitary confinement, graphic designer, propagandist, early Soviet film star, Poet, suicide. There is no comprehensive collection of Mayakovsky’s poetry available in English and in response to the lack Michael Almereyda has assembled “a Mayakovsky bestiary.” Night Wraps the Sky: Writing By and Ģ����ý Mayakovsky is a scrapbook assemblage of prose and poetry, a carefully edited montage of language and imagery—imagine a book-length Rodchenko collage with the atmosphere of a black and white silent film. Mayakovsky’s more autobiographical and better known poems including A Few Words Ģ����ý Myself, with the scandalously infamous opening of “I love to watch children dying,” are presented in a single language edition with fresh translations by Katya Apekina, Val Vinokur and Matvei Yankelevich.

Early on, John Berger’s spot-on essay explains how the stars aligned for the young Mayakovsky as he was discovering his way in life. Pushkin wrote language and plot which combined the colloquial with the erudite and Mayakovsky— combining the low brow with high brow—is a direct descendant of this tradition. After the Revolution, as part of the sweeping reforms that the new government was imposing, the Russian language itself was simplified. A growing literate proletariat audience found Mayakovsky’s muscular verse to be accessible and stirring. “Then he reads his poems. The whole hall, opponents and supporters, cools into an attentive, tense silence. With unrivaled mastery Mayakovsky recites. His famous voice rings out bold and sincere, filling every nook and cranny of the museum hall. Even the attendants, who have heard many, many things in that hall, listen spellbound.”

He was dynamic, street-smart and handsome. He understood how to Talk Dirty and Influence People as Lenny Bruce would say, though Vinokur compares him to Eminem. Whether intuitive or intentional, wielding his larger than life being and his booming voice, Mayakovsky understood performance and crowd psychology.

Mayakovsky carried the Revolution in his coat pocket and wrote leftist political poetry as he carried Lili Brik in his heart. Completing the triad forming an already open relationship, Mayakovsky met Lili and Osip Brik in July, 1915 which he classified as “Happiest Date” in his journals. Lili Brik began establishing herself as Mayakovsky’s muse. In Lilichka! written in 1916, the poet celebrates his love for his Little-Lili but even through the coarse of the celebration there is an overt desperation present; a foreshadowing of loss that can derive only through uncertainty. He could command an auditorium of people but Mayakovsky could not control Lili or his own seeming obsession with the Briks.

In the bleary front hall,
my arm, broken by trembling,
doesn’t fit into the sleeve.
I’ll run out,
throw my body into the street.
Feral,
crazed,
lacerated by despair.

The imagery is reminiscent of early Akhmatova’s famous poetic moment, from the collection Evening, where silently and internally shattered but self-contained a woman places her left glove onto her right hand. Mayakovsky has none of Akhmatova’s tempered restraint. He is feral but he loves too. What is the difference? “Acmeism [Mandelshtam, Akhmatova, Gumilyov] was an apartment with a window that looked out on an imagined green and blue landscape from Italy, and an old library with very few books; Futurism [Mayakovsky, Shklovsky, Lili and Osip Brik] was a house with a red-haired dog, a Mexican blanket, and thin paper for printing magazines.”

While post-Revolution Russia seemed to be in a perpetual state of flux, Lenin’s death served as the water-marker denoted that all things ahead were deeper and murkier. By the time Mayakovsky was to have his twenty year retrospective, Stalin was solidly in power. “His exhibition Twenty Years of Work, which opened on February 1, 1930 . . . was boycotted by all official writers’ groups, and was visited almost exclusively by students. He paced the empty rooms, with a ‘sad and austere face, arms folded behind him.’”

Perhaps the most important thing that Almereyda brings across is showing how Mayakovsky has survived through time. Regardless of the lack of a comprehensive selection of his poetry in English, he has been able to influence the English speaking world in addition to the Russian.

. . . always embrace things, people earth
sky stars, as I do, freely and with
the appropriate sense of space. That
is your inclination, known in the heavens
and you should follow it to hell, if
necessary, which I doubt.
A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island, Frank O’Hara, 1958

Edited by Michael Almereyda
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
304 pgs, $27.00

Her most recent work, particularly in translation, moves with fierce speed, which lends her blending of disparate images and emotions an all the more urgent beauty. While the collection is divided into sections, the images and themes – political, historical, and personal – spill freely from part to part, in constant dialogue. Her manuscript as a whole is perhaps best represented – in both content and style – by “Interments”, a central sequence in which each untitled fragment burrows deeper than its predecessor, weaving images almost as a code, dazzling with spectral collisions on a brightly colored, often gendered landscape. She writes from a very particular grief, very particular history of violence in her home country and abroad, but in her art these things descend into universal images: “She took them for cats when they were warriors/ they weren’t warriors either but curved lines walking in their sleep/… she says birds so as not to say war/ she says war so as not to say madness of the son and the pomegranate tree.”

When Khoury-Ghata struggles with a particular death, she struggles with all suffering. The warriors in her poetry are men, young and old, unable to nurture sweetness and lightness, choosing instead the destructive. As “Interments” descends to its center, Khoury-Ghata gives us an unguarded woman, urging man to forget transgression and to be redeemed in the present, the domestic, and the creative: “The woman open on the gardens/ urges the traveler to leave the rain behind him/ he has nothing to fear from the walls/ nothing to fear from the stroller/ which flew off as soon as the child went to sleep.”

At times, she seems to write explicitly from her own experience. At others, it is evident that she constructs a persona. Her speaker is often highly self-conscious, openly referring to the act of writing: “Blackening pages till words exhaust themselves and this character emerges, whom I’m seeing for the first time.” This can make approaching the book’s first two sections somewhat precarious. While understanding the narrative threads may be difficult, her lines have the feel of individual aphorisms that as a whole constitute disparate beauty of great range, but also of singular emotion: grief or ecstasy, gravity or grace. Nettles is both a fine example of Khoury-Ghata’s voice and a daring exploration of style.

By Venus Khoury-Ghata
Translated by Marilyn Hacker
Graywolf Press
120 pgs, $14.00

There are about 90 poems in the collection, in which the poet either simply or elaborately—and always clearly—describes a world marked by despair. The collection begins with a little girl’s dream about dying and the speaker’s effort to sooth her by telling her “It was just a dream.” Continuing through the poems, the theme of death is as threatening as it is in the first poem, and here and there, it completely takes over. Much further into the collection, a poem called “Clara” echoes the relationship between the speaker and the girl from early on. The poem begins, “Oh, I see her hanging. / But she didn’t hang herself,” then ends with the line, “And she was guilty of nothing.”

The poems range in tone from quietly desperate to ironic to resigned, yet no poem feels like it does not belong; all seem to have been written from a certain perspective, the poet confident in his own awareness. After all, the collection is his last, written late in life, while he is preoccupied with those who have already died, and, of course, with his own death. In the poem called “Patience,” the speaker says,

No, the dead aren’t getting bored.
Far away they are waiting for me to reach them.
And waiting, they leaf through a book
with wet pages—and they smile at me.

Many of the poems involve only a few short lines, but there is something powerful about each one. The images within are often strikingly vivid, at other times vague, and there are even some poems without images at all. Under the title “My Life,” the poet gives four lines:

I am looking for my lost life.
And I cannot find it.
My life is a bankruptcy.

And? And? And?

It is as if he is still groping for the words to describe his loss, but he lets the questions mark the poem, perhaps even more than that considering the title. The poet does not offer any simple answers; there is no single take-away message. In the poem called “So Remain,” the speaker says, “Don’t ever ask anyone/ anything,” just, “remain“—a lovely bit of advice from one who has realized that often we humans “understand/ nothing at all”

Jebeleanu is sometimes considered the epic poet of Romania, an awesome claim, but one that I can’t yet speak to considering how recently I’ve been introduced to Romanian literature. However, I have become attached to this collection, perhaps because it offers a kind of intensity that is rarely so genuine, or accessible. Jebeleanu’s poems hail from a very specific historical moment, but the personal nature of the work, and his voice, gives them lasting relevance.

By Eugen Jebeleanu
Translated by Matthew Zapruder and Radu Ioanid
Coffee House Press
98 pgs, $15.00