22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
deepest pathways, his longest skies, April 12, 2004
This review is from: The Unfinished Crusade : New and Selected Poems (Paperback)
This man writes poetry somewhat as Alfred Housman wrote poetry, in an attempt to create perfection of order where only chaos and imperfection had existed. He rhymes or he doesn't rhyme, as the occasion requires. Each poem is different and yet each poem reflects an appreciation of human achievement that is not only a pose. He doesn't care if you approve of him, while he writes, and he seldom attempts to achieve his own approval: the essential light that he follows commands him to selflessness and he follows it like a dutiful acolyte. The voice he listens to, and the voice he listens for, comes from his deepest pathways, his longest skies, his darkest woods.
Quasimodo
As he lies mid his retinue of rats,
oblivious to the trickling water
and the maelstrom in the babbling sewer,
one might think his nose a hovel for flies
in the low and oppressive August heat,
but gladly he sleeps the sleep of the just,
like a foetus double-crossed in the womb.
Who but the passing ethereal white clouds,
or the bent proprietress of a dive
in those drunken days before her passing,
ever noticed to care by whim or chance
how he resembled a pigeon walking
in the ocean of misery and mud
neighbouring the cathedral of the damned?
Or how he spit when he spoke over bowls
of steaming porridge in the good hospice
run by six eternally stoned eunuchs,
his words brilliant as moonshine through stained glass,
simple as the stars in their begging truth,
though none and all understood their meanings
by the soft intonations of his grunts?
And now for the umpteenth and final time
he lies high in a heap like a dunghill
waiting for the street-cleaners to clean him up,
the sun bursting through his shuttered eyelids,
his eardrums full of Gregorian chants,
while the rats scurry like flawed apostles
in the wake of flapping but broken wings...
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20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bad Boy in the Dark, March 29, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: The Unfinished Crusade : New and Selected Poems (Paperback)
Imagine a world whose enduring features are rust, moldy bread, the chill wind from an industrial-gray sky, crows, leafless trees, littered streets, loneliness, urgency and guilt. Such a world offers little to write about, and yet it offers an arena in which longing, despair, poverty, hope and the hints of transformation are the reader's constant companion.
Leo Yankevich sketches such a world in "The Unfinished Crusade". Whether it's real, stylized or imaginary, its presence pervades the poems in this collection. Perhaps this is the world of Poland in the dying phase and the aftermath of communism, or the shattered cityscapes of post-World War II Eastern Europe, or only the imaginary bleakness of a character whose life has taken a constant downward turn into a squalid stasis. In any case, this book is a journal of squalor and its unrelenting presence. Yet, in this bleak rustscape, there is life-persistent life, that of the constantly cawing rooks, the drunk, the leprous woman whose eventual transformation seems to justify her misery, the rats in the cupboard, and the downcast who pass like wraiths outside the flat or in the anonymous city in which the poems play out.
These poems stylize Yankevich's world, but present it again and again with the repetitiveness of haiku, each with its subtle individuality, offering new insights into the inhabitants of this sad and persistent society.
"The Dog" describes the transformation of a dead dog into a temple through whose bones the wind kneels to pray. "Silesian Landscape" sketches the bleakness of the ruined terrain in January. In it, ravens cough up their blasphemies on a gray day without snow. This image recurs throughout the collection. Yankevich's ubiquitous rooks are as persistent as Poe's raven-and more sinister.
"The Prayer" recognizes the succession of life into oblivion as seen through the boy's resignation to his father's aging and death, prefiguring his own. This parallels Seamus Heaney's similar poem about his father, stooping to dig in the potato fields. The agricultural tradition reappears sporadically through the poems of "The Unfinished Crusade".
"To Touch the April Rain" connects us with the lives of those who created the products and artifacts we touch. Eventually, it all comes to nothing-no one cares. The invocation of the spring rain reminds us of Sara Teasdale's gentle, sad but equally cynical "There Will Come Soft Rains":
"And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly"
"Break of Dawn" reveals the poet's recognition of the certainty of death, the fragility of life, and the felt obligation to make the most of it. It is a rubaiyyat without cheer, an urgent and persistent obligation, without certain reward, to realize the verity of being:
".No,
on and on you must go;
this life do what you can;
eternity has no end."
The brevity of life emerges in this poem that contemplates power and guilt at its exercise in "The Moth":
"I hold it as if to somehow show
that all depends on the force's whim
that if I choose not to let it go
and crush it, I perpetrate no sin.
Yet, when I open my hands, guilt stings:
the powdery white flakes were once wings."
The villanelle "The Recluse" sketches the loneliness of the poet in the midst of life. "Is it dream or reality he fears?"
In a related and brief excursion into holocaust, "Sarajevo Sonnet" remarks the continuation of life in the stark deprivation after society collapses-the marriage of a young couple next to a skeleton in uniform. The young couple are revealed to be two tiny black beetles.
The collection continues, each poem building on and reinforcing the others in a framework as inexorable and unyielding as the twisted girders of a decaying, once-great medieval city, such as, say, Baltimore or Philadelphia. But now and then a brief and uncertain light illuminates the slag and deformation:
"I'd appeal my sentence, seek solace from seers,
but the child in me knows: beyond destinies
light is everywhere, and redeems us all."
(The Bridge)
Yankevich's book is a memorable and unsettling sketch of the conditions it explores. This review may not adequately express the force of its poems, and readers should take the book as the best guide. As we face continued uncertainty in the global economy and the unease that the future may not be bright, Leo Yankevich's "The Unfinished Crusade" is a sober description of an alternative and all-too plausible future. Its chronicle of how one person manages the question of the value of life is a reminder and a moral, like the rooks, drunkards and scarecrows that populate his world.
I recommend this book highly.
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