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Dancing in Odessa

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Reviewed by Small Spiral Notebook:

It was in 1993 that the family of poet/lawyer Ilya Kaminsky received asylum as political refugees. Kaminsky has never returned to the "city of his childhood" because the country he left exists only in his imagination. Still, he has documented that life and its memories in his first full-length book, "Dancing In Odessa."

Winner of the 2002 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press, "Dancing In Odessa" is a joyous achievement. Passionate. Compassionate. Daring in its use of imaginative language. Though the work, written in English, has a deep feeling for a life lived in another country, the words transcend to one universal.

The book opens with "Author's Prayer," a work that sets the tone for the work.

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.

Continuing to speak, the importance of words and language, is predominant in Kaminsky's poems. Perhaps that can be contributed to his early life in the Soviet Union; among other things, his grandfather killed and his grandmother exiled to Siberia. Kaminsky has stated that "family narrative" is not his "thing;" his goal is one of "imaginary memoir," of being a storyteller and so he writes.

In Praise of Laughter," he mentions the need for continuance:

all our words, heaps of burning feathers
that rise and rise with each retelling.

And in the title poem:

I retell the story the light etches
Into my hand: Little book, go to the city
without me.

One section of the book, Musica Humana, is an elegy for Osip Mandelstam, a Russian poet who dared to criticize Joseph Stalin in his work. Mandelstam was imprisoned and exiled. The poems are simply delicious in their use of language and imagery.

Once or twice in his life, a man
is peeled like apples.

What's left is a voice
that splits his being

down to the center.
We see: obscenity, fright mud

and

He believed in the human being. Could not
cure himself
of Petersburg. He cited by heart
phone numbers
of the dead.

"Dancing In Odessa" is a collection of poetry that excited me. Not only due to Kaminsky's use of the English language, but for the truths he shares. In the section "Praise," he speaks of his family's leaving Odessa.

This is how we live on earth, Kaminsky writes. "A flock of sparrows./the darkness, a magician, finds quarters/behind our ears. We don't know what life is,/who makes it, the reality is thick/with longing. We put it up to our lips/and drink."

This book was like a blow to the head - thunderously moving, intensely tragic, uplifting, and comic by turns. The way the author weaves his poems together in the book is inspiring - a turn of phrase or image recurs in a way that seems totally natural, as in musical phrases. His love poetry to "Natalia" is everything love poetry should be. A pleasure to read - and the book is even more amazing considering the writer is so young and that English is not his first language. Also, unlike so many modern poets, though Kaminsky's poetry often deals with horrific events, the overall movement of the book is optimistic, even dare I say the work uplifting.
Applause, applause.

I had the pleasure of hearing Ilya Kaminsky read his poetry from Dancing in Odessa the other day at my college. He came into the room and seemed a bit shy at first. Uncertain as to "what to do" he began to read from his book. A powerful and lyrical voice filled the room and everyone was glued to her/his seat listening. He not only writes wonderful, thought-provoking and dazzling poems but he reads with an energy unsurpassed. He uses his voice in incredible ways, incredible ranges and he employs his whole body in the experience. One gets the sense she is witness to something profound and passionate, spellbinding. Kaminsky's voice is strange, beautiful and musical.

Kudos to Tupelo Press for selecting and publishing Dancing in Odessa (the book itself is lovely). If you're bored with most contemporary American poetry, or don't trust most poetry in translation, you've got to read this. Here is a poet that can make you believe in the possibililty of poetry, that real poetry is still possible.

This book cannot be praised enough. Here you have the opportunity to read the early poems of one of the generation's best poets. As has been remarked by previous reviewers, there is an optimism in Kaminsky's poems even amidst tragedy; an unearthly eloquence and musicality to each and every line. It is an unbelievably refreshing tone.

You'll breeze through the book in no time and then realize that you can spend a day on every page. This is a book of transport - to another time, another country, in other bodies and minds - and what you will find there is a new mythos - cities of birds and song and silence all together. And there, on the bench reading a small book filled with beauty in the midst of cobblestones? Why it is you.

I highly recommend Ilya Kaminsky's first book. It is full of small beautiful lyric moments that rise across history. His love poems are simply beautiful. I can't agree more with those reviewers too who mention Kaminsky's style of reading. The poet Joe Weil once wrote "poetry has forgotten how to praise/ forgotten how to pray." Ilya Kaminsky has not forgotten either.

I've said before, and I'll say again: I love Ilya Kaminsky. Whatever cleverer reviewers have written is true. There's a din, I know. I've seen your eyes. You've read too many machinepoems, chatted too much, eaten too much cheese. Help is on the way.

from the first encounter to the sixtieth, this book grabs and holds. It is a daring, beautiful debut and the kind of book that makes me invest in books of poetry, hopeful each time that they will yield the percentage of brilliance and beauty that this book does. Kaminsky reminds me why we write and why we read.

This is the best book of poetry I've read in years. I read it again and again.
I couldn't recommend it more.

John FitzGerald, author of Spring Water

Book Review of "Dancing in Odessa" by Ilya Kaminsky


Many have spoken in awe when considering Kaminsky's youth. In his mid-twenties, he produced a work that offers a lifetime of thoughts and observations. But it's not Kaminsky's youth we should be in awe with, but instead his ability to extend moments. In "Dancing in Odessa", the reader is not bound to a simpleton's rendering of a town and it's peoples. The reader is instead edified with long moments detailing a town's harsh history, artistic revival, and commune with tradition and culture.

At the advent of Kaminsky's collection, he writes an author's prayer. Similar to activating the muse, a convention born from myth and spiritual doctrine, Kaminksy informs the reader that these poems and stories are bigger than him, and he wants to do the seminal authors some justice. From Kaminsky's muse, we learn his poetry will not parade own art, but it will subtract and refine from a city's prized oral history.

Kaminsky's poems allow readers to walk, with their own legs, through the old-world town of Odessa. His poems concern action and movement, and do not shield the reader from beauty or evil. Odessa is a town with a history of violence, and the poem "Maestro" captures the disruption and despair of a school bombing. "In praise of laughter" reveals the literal rape of a grandmother, and the figurative rape of a town. "Aunt Rose" describes Kaminsky's heroic aunt, and her graceful negotiation of love in these times of pain and horror.

Kaminsky's poems reach the reader by way of poor Russian families who have no other hope than to stick together. He does not disguise private pain, and writes that his grandmother, "understood/loneliness, hid the dead in the earth like partisans" in "Dancing in Odessa". When Kaminsky leaves Odessa and marries, he takes the saints and martyrs of the town with him.

Kaminsky became deaf at age four. His poems however, transcend human ears to show us music in element form. His "disability" allows him to blanket the page with silence better than any poet I can remember reading, and certain poems go from a warm symphony of words to a flat empty tone. This is ever present in the series "Musica Humana" where he writes, "I escape and I am caught, escape again and am caught, escape and am caught: in this song, the signer is a clay figure/poetry is the self--I resist/the self". It is also present later in this series at the lines, "onto a woman's skin: those are lines / sewn entirely of silence".

Kaminsky's poetic devices are to die for. He writes in Musica Humana (20), "once or twice in his life, a man / is pealed like apples. What's left is a voice/ that splits his being". Here Kaminsky begins a narrative with a combined simile-metaphor with a surreal twist. He continues this poem to show he has been warped, and shaped, by the harsh ways and determined voices of local poets and his town. Odessa is a place we both love and fear. Travelling to Odessa requires quite a stomach!

When Kaminsky leaves Odessa, he brings back spirituality in the form of art to the poor in his town. His poems remind me of Charles Spurgeon's prayers to Europe in the 19th century, where poverty and illness abounded. Kaminsky's words do not seek salvation from God as much as they seek salvation from anyone, even the reader. This is clear when he writes "Oh God of Abraham, or Isaac and of Jacob /On your scale of Good and Evil, / put a plate of warm food." Later in the same series, Kaminsky offers a recipe for "Cold Mint Cucumber Soup".

Finally, Kaminsky's poems are realist stories. The reader is taken to Odessa for better or worse. In his section "Natalia", he applies the same adulation to flawed people as he would to flawed cities. Describing his lover, he compares her to a holy place writing, "the back of her knee: a blessed territory," and later "I don't need a synagogue you said, I can pray inside my body".

Kaminsky's work reflects years of lives in single lines, and extends moments into generations. Dancing in Odessa is a human-interest work, and his details of a city are not without the human hands that built it. I do not need to travel to Odessa, but if I did, I would not get anymore information touching the stones of the town's walls than I could from reading Kaminski's collection.

His poems are tightly connected and organized, with each poem giving us information essential for getting the full affect of the next. These poems need to be read as a collection, because taking them one-by-one we will lose some of the work's heavy depth, and will water down the extended moments Kaminsky uses to shape the character of the town.


Kaminsky, Ilya. "Dancing in Odessa". Tupelo Press Vermont, 2006