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Long Fall: Poems, Texts, and Essays

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long fall (a title without capitals, a book without capitols) is a book of practice. Essays and poems locate the poet and poetry in intercultural space. Insights of the emigre open a perspective on the detached, deranged, misfit position of the artist, the wanderer in all societies. The way this all works as a book: Gritsman the critic discusses Mandelstam, Brodsky, and Eliot, and the texts mysteriously widen to describe the condition of the writer (the Ur writer) and apply minutely to the poet, Andrey Gritsman. There's (an exciting) hall of mirrors effect, explained, I think, by Gritsman's having grown deeply into poets and poems. In all this, the intercultural writer survives as "a gifted and skillful scout...better oriented on this island than...the natives"--to turn an apercu on himself. Somewhere down around the bottom line: Gritsman is a gifted translator with the arsenal of technique at his back, with essays on Mandelstam to prove it. But there's more. As a poet, Gritsman operates in a landscape where it is

...as if an opaque story of a family

nests behind the house, in the garden
that is the insects' paradise, the world of tireless rodents.

Vestiges of life are stirring in the back rooms,
The walls hold reflections of the perpetual shadows

...This is a dominion
of light, the world where everyone is gone
--from "Magritte: Dominion of Light"

"...although [the] images and metaphors are complicated...{Gritsman} knows what he means and what he is talking about....this is not a suggestive medium of private symbols. This is a real life that is being lived with events and things skinned down to their final meanings," which is is a comment lifted from another context because it applies like a hand in a glove or a shoe that fits.