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The peculiar institution of American poetry has long been fascinated with its Russian counterpart, and while this fascination does not appear to have waned since the so-called end of the so-called Cold War, it does not appear to have deepened, either. In the decades following World War II, Russian-language writers like Joseph Brodsky were embraced in the West not only for their verbal artistry, but also for their aura of moral authority, their status as truth-tellers or seers in the face of what the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz termed "a conspiracy of silence." In more recent years, a bumper crop of younger poets, including Philip Nikolayev, Katia Kapovich, and Ilya Kaminsky, have forged lives and careers in both English and Russian. With "My Soviet Union," the widely anticipated debut of poet and anthologist Michael Dumanis, we encounter another order of the assimilated author: the heritage speaker or early transplant whose Mother Russia is further back in the mind, a personal myth or memory, as nonexistent a country as one's own Soviet Union can be. Though he speaks Russian, Dumanis seems wholly rooted in American language and tradition.
This in itself makes "My Soviet Union" worth reading. Anyone who has followed the Russian presence in anglophone literature will be interested in this latest development, and anyone who has found his or her imagination lyrically stirred by Russia may wish to observe what Dumanis has done here. But the shades of exotic melancholy that Russia almost inevitably evokes in Western minds are also this collection's most persistent weakness. Dumanis' work is highly referential -- to literary personalities, important texts and strange locales -- and often demonstrates the inadequacy of allusion to the serious and provocative exploration of an idea, emotion, or image. That is, regardless of how earnestly Dumanis may feel his connections to such writers as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Walter Benjamin, to the Caspian Sea and Phnom Penh, to the Russian Silver Age and Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," these connections rarely seem honest or complete as acts of mind. It is as if the poet were holding back from looking too seriously or intelligently at those things to which his obvious intellect draws his attention. Or, as Dumanis puts it in the opening stanzas of "Memoir":
There comes the point
in every story
when I panic,
there comes this panic,
I catch myself clutching
a wrench at a Wal-Mart,
a wren in a field,
clutching a wrist
near a radio tower,
or someone's key
I had not been aware of,
turning the knob
of a make-believe door.
The poem flits along, skillfully avoiding whatever its subject might be. Avoidance is itself a rich and moving subject for poems, though not of this one. Each time the poet opens an opportunity to delve into evasion as a lyric strategy or psychic need, he panics, reaching for "a wrench at a Wal-Mart" or "a make-believe door," whatever red herring might distract the reader -- and perhaps the writer -- from the unavoidable difficulty of saying something interesting and original about the poet's world.
Dumanis demonstrates no small measure of compositional skill, and his lines can be both visually imaginative and rhythmically stirring, as we see in the last lines of "The Woods Are Burning," the longer poem that opens the collection:
this would-be obscured
trap of doorway and these
various passions of clowns
along with them the memory
of riding a train
through a forest on fire
then passing the fire
and seeing the platform
and leaving the train
The contrast between the vague catastrophe and the restrained tones that intimate it lend these lines a certain charge, though they cannot escape the gravitational pull of what precedes them, a mishmash of convenient wordplay and fleeting name-checks for Lillian Gish and Paul Celan. What sticks with the reader is the "would-be obscured / trap of doorway," the poet's constant grasping after a way out of danger. These poems can be occasionally cryptic, but they are rarely difficult, so consistently do they avoid the difficulties just beneath the surfaces of their ostensible subjects.
"Ostensible" subjects, because this is a poetry of negation, not subtraction. Poetry has to name things in order to cross them out of the world, to claim them in language. Dumanis' poems, on the contrary, seem afraid to strip away the layers of their own universe. Instead, this poet, much like Fyodor Dostoevsky's Underground Man, keeps pulling back from what he has said or intended. It is a pattern repeated with infuriating frequency, as in "The Woods Are Burning": "Words disappear: I asked my students what apartheid was. / All of them knew, / except the ones who were black. / None of my students were black." Or "The Rainy Season": "I didn't love her, so I said I did, / and just about fell over from those words, / the guilt thereof, then gestured to my groin." Or "Baku, 1980":
For reasons beyond my control,
I eat potatoes and wear
a bib in Azerbaijan,
where I wasn't born,
where the muezzins will not
spread word of my death.
Dumanis' Soviet Union is a mythic space where, like the actual Soviet Union, a great deal is going on, but no one really wants to talk about it. The speakers of these poems are masters of bait-and-switch; they maneuver around their subjects and load the reader down with details that seem more significant than the poems prove them to be. Sometimes this subterfuge is so thick that one wonders whether evasion is the end rather than the means, as in the opening lines of "Revisionist History": "The poem was a razorblade, glinting and modern. / An archeologist caught sight of it under the fallen / midsection of a Doric column in the buried / Albanian walled city of Butrint." Not surprisingly, the poem goes on to demonstrate how "the poem" is a thousand other things and, at the same time, none of them, a lesson one can easily learn without the help of this poem.
Given that most of "My Soviet Union" strains not to find something in the lyric imagination, the book's fourth and final section, well worth the price of the whole, is that much more surprising. Rather than thinking themselves out of their concerns, "Professional Extra," "All the Greatest Stories Ever Told," and "Side Effect in B-minor" think into the sense of personal and cultural displacement the earlier poems push to the side. In the last of these poems, the poet fully embraces the discomforts of a life that is both socially and spatially transitory: "After each devastation, a parade / holds itself in my honor: the sirens, / the garters, the left-behind lover, / and, salvaged from the previous parade, / half in Cyrillic, half illegible, a banner." By the poem's last line -- "If the parade won't save us, nothing will." -- there is a strong sense that something has clicked, and that the disappointments of "My Soviet Union" might be allayed by the gritty perseverance its closing section promises, or that the beautiful closing lines of "Certain Things" demand: "Go hunt that small of marble, huge of earth, that thing / you haven't seen in ages or before, / that ease of speech, that wish you owned, the nameless one. / There are too many passages to love."
By Benjamin Paloff
http://www.themoscowtimes.com
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