Balakian’s New York Trilogy: A Review by Ruth Hoberman

New York Trilogy
By Peter Balakian
The University of Chicago Press, 2025

Here’s a strange thing: as I read Peter Balakian’s New York Trilogy, I kept thinking of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Not because they resemble each other—although in both poems a pair of lovers hovers over the proceedings—but because Balakian’s set of three long linked poems feels like a response to, even a dismantling of, Arnold’s turn away from a desolate world. “Ah, love, let us be true/ to one another!” the speaker says in his 1867 poem:

. . . we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Can two lovers turn to each other and shut out those ignorant armies? Balakian, at seventy-four, has spent his writing career refusing to shut things out. New York Trilogy reads as the culmination of his life-long concern with how poetry can address—honestly, but with that complexity and beauty unique to poetry—the twin poles of human atrocity and cultural achievement; of planetary extinction and possibility. “No plankton = no world:” he writes, “who can take in the dread—//and I’m already late to pick up Ani at dance class” (46).

Balakian grew up in a prosperous New Jersey suburb in a family of Armenian descent. The sufferings of his ancestors were not discussed. In his riveting memoir Black Dog of Fate, he writes of a single instance when his grandmother wandered into his room at night and muttered incoherent fragments suggestive of the horrors she’d seen: “The Turk had an ax and a short knife with a mother-of-pearl handle. The blood was warm then cold. . . . He was like a dead animal on me. I watched the dead feathers fly up into a blue sky where my box kite flew at Easter . . .” (31). Balakian went on to write a history of this first “modern” genocide, The Burning Tigris (2003). But mainly he has published poems—New York Trilogy is his ninth collection—in which historical trauma sometimes appears in fragmented images much like those his grandmother uttered in his room that night.

New York Trilogy brings together three long poems that were already published separately. The first, “A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy,” appeared in Ziggurat (2010); “Ozone Journal” in a 2015 book of that name (which won the Pulitzer Prize); and the third, “No Sign,” in No Sign (2022). But always, he says, he envisioned them as a single piece. Collectively, they place the poem’s speaker in relation to a vast geographical and historical landscape. As Balakian explains in an author’s note, “The life and imagination of the persona are impacted by various historical events: the Armenian Genocide, Hiroshima, the Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic, 9/11, the US war in Iraq, and the geo-climate crisis.” Montage, fragmentation, the juggling of multiple time frames and sources, as well as variations in verse form, diction, and pacing make for some challenging reading. But ultimately, I found the book tremendously moving in its search for clarity in a life lived in full awareness of the present moment—with all its historical, cultural, geographical, and political context still attached.

Take “A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy,” for example, whose title establishes the multiple strands running through its forty-five sections. When the poem opens, its speaker is on the subway visualizing the cover of Leonard Woolley’s Excavations at Ur and remembering his life in 1970s New York: “ . . . I’m just moving on a system of fuses,/while the fruit stands of Spanish Harlem fly above,//and even now remembering when we were here/after Nixon waved goodbye and rose in the chopper.” The short stanzas—mainly couplets or tercets—hurdle us from the subway’s dark to the dark “that wrapped our bodies, up all night, like violent paint/on the sheets” to the dig at Ur (a city-state in Mesopotamia that would eventually be part of Iraq) where Woolley unearthed, among other things, a ziggurat: avatar of Babel and the World Trade Center, of technological prowess and hubris (3).

In “Writing Horizontal: Notes Toward the Poem as Space,” published in his 2015 collection Vise and Shadow, Balakian explains his poetic goal: an “aesthetic-kinetic force” that takes in the moment—complete with its “indigestible” aspects—on both a personal and planetary scale—absorbing “stuff, things, ideas, voices, bric-a-brac, a bit like a Rauschenberg combine.” A poem that engages with history, he writes in “The Poem as History” (also in Vise and Shadow) has “an omnivorous appetite, eccentric, eclectic, never pretending to anything but a fragment or an immersion in a corner of a larger history.” Such a poem, he writes, offers “insights to the inner life of social chaos, seen deeply in poetic imagination.” This pretty much describes the methodology of New York Trilogy—its first two parts at least.

What results is a dynamic, disturbing account of human achievement colliding periodically with the “chthonic zigzag of hubris” (14). Excavation, building, and collapse recur throughout, sources of both beauty and horror. Balakian’s diction sometimes veers into technical, numerical, even algebraic language. That “system of fuses” the book opens with suggests the poem’s mix of lyricism and technical specifications:

PONYA WTC 213.00 236B4-9 558 35 TONS

Under the cranes, hydraulic lifts, guy wires, derricks,
I sat with a couple Sabretts and a Coke,
the ozone blotting out Jersey. (11)

Disorienting, but also gorgeous and exciting, this architecture. Working as a messenger for a shipping company, the speaker is among the first inside the newly built World Trade Center: “Inside the glass box/I looked back at myself/as in a fun-house room where/each plane shattered/any idea of the whole” (24). Of course, we see another kind of plane coming to shatter that glass. But for the moment it’s just dazzling, evoking the shifting planes of the poem itself. Of the demolition that made way for construction: “the whole mid-century slid into a pit/and the sun made gothic trees of the falling windows” (3).

“A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy” ends at dawn, “with its faint industrial orange/glow and sun on the river” (32). Part 2, “Ozone Journal”—the longest part, with fifty-four sections—opens, “I woke to CFC humming out of coils” (37). Those chlorofluorocarbons aren’t doing the ozone layer any good, but air conditioning is essential, given where the speaker is: “All day I was digging Armenian bones out of the Syrian desert” (37). Another excavation, this time for whatever was left of the hundreds of thousands of Armenians forced—as part of the 1915-16 genocide—into the desert to die.

Each of the three poems has disaster at its core. In “A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy,” besides the destruction of the World Trade Center and the 2003 war in Iraq that followed, the speaker loses the woman he’s involved with: “You disappeared on the train reading Merleau-Ponty./I got lost in Queens on the E” (5); and a friend, “John,” is badly wounded as an embedded journalist in Iraq. “Ozone Journal” addresses not only the Armenian genocide, but also the 1980s concern with the thinning ozone layer, and AIDS, which kills the speaker’s cousin David. And in “No Sign,” mass destruction surfaces in the memory of Hiroshima and Vietnam as well as large-scale ecocide.

These disasters raise the question of survival: are we in a Yeatsian cycle, where “all things fall and are built again”? Or is the end the end? In “A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy,” John’s suffering—he babbles as “Chinese, French, sounds just come pell-mell”—along with the World Trade Center collapse evokes the biblical Babel, while Ur and its ziggurat remind us of Gilgamesh with its flood. Balakian cites Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction as one of his sources for “No Sign.” There’s a real question, at the end of New York Trilogy, as to whether life on our planet can survive.

On the plus side are all the things Balakian obviously loves. The New York skyline (“the sky was graphed/through phone wires and Amtrak cables,” he tells us in “Ozone Journal” [39]), visual art (Franz Kline especially), music (Miles Davis especially) and ideas (John Cage, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin). There’s also the love affair (despite its eventual failure) and Ani, the daughter born in “Ozone Journal.” Also, in “Ozone Journal,” Balakian interweaves the speaker’s visits to his dying cousin with visits to “Jerry,” a record company executive based on George Avakian, who promoted many jazz musicians—Miles Davis among them. Davis’s music, particularly his 1959 album Kind of Blue, surfaces again and again as a solace and hope: “Gray-yellow light over the river;/ got a train to Riverdale and sat with Jerry,” Balakian writes, then quotes Jerry himself, with a citation attributed to Cage in the middle:

“We were there till the early light came into the club

and Miles was shaking like a paralytic”

Cultivate in yourself a grand similarity
with the chaos of the surrounding ether;

unloose your mind; set your spirit free;
be still as if you had no soul (Cage)

“Miles laughed, then passed out,

that sense of nothing—ness came
alive when we did the Blue sessions. . . .” (42)

Later in the same poem, sandwiched between sections on AIDS and the Shadadeh Caves, “where Armenians were asphyxiated in the summer of 1916” (68), the speaker remembers the album as he walks through the City after a meeting:

. . . light warping
through the glass of Grand Central:

everything goes Bohemian cobalt
Persian lapis, the Virgin’s cloak—

color of longing over mountains—
that’s how Miles drained his trumpet. (58)

Light returns me to the poem’s energy, spilling from stanza to stanza. There’s the “hammered silver air over the river” (46), “the violet end of infrared at sunset” (51), even the “glowing, dioxin sun” (70). There’s the white flash associated with insight (if also less positively, with atomic blasts), and best of all, there’s blue light, as in these lines near the end of “Ozone Journal”: “Half-light of morning/floating over the Euphrates;//long breath in: warm black: slow breath out—cool blue.//If you feel the emptiness, you can see anything: be in it: as matter, as matter of fact” (65). All that destruction, but somehow the light—varied, rhythmic, shifting, like a line of jazz—keeps us going.

“No Sign,” the final poem, has, like “A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy,” forty-five sections, but differs in tone and form. A “He” and “She” sit on the New Jersey side of the Hudson looking toward the George Washington Bridge and talk, mainly about watching, at the Angelika in New York City, Alain Resnais’s classic 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour. The language here is starker, its tone not unlike Marguerite Duras’s screenplay for that film, in which the two characters identified only as “Lui” and “Elle” speak to each other in stilted language. The time period seems to be our current moment (there’s a reference to Trump signing Bibles) but with a post-apocalyptic feel. “Did our house fall down?” He asks (69). The diction ranges wildly from poetic reminiscence (“sussurring leaves licked us” [77]) to profane (“fuck//that was where Gaea and Pan/were supposed to hold hands” [79]).

He and She quote at times from the movie, but their desultory, fragmented exchanges also allude to the very immediate disasters threatening now— “postmodern homo sapiens” being on the verge, it’s hinted, of an extinction event (87). The Palisades feel not like a scenic outlook but the crust of some ancient upheaval: “We’re standing on bloated eons of cliff crevice—” He says (78), subject to geologic as well as human-made events. And later, “We’re here//facing something//we can’t imagine—” (79). We left “Ozone Journal” in the “Half-light of morning.” “No Sign” opens with He asking, “Is it night already?”

She answers, “No,” but we’re never sure she’s right. It feels a bit like the unchanging gray sky of Beckett’s Endgame. For the first time the poem seems to wonder whether there is language adequate to the task it has taken on. As Duras says in the preface to her screenplay: “All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima.” Are there words (or signs) adequate to convey such horror? Are words (or signs) even helpful if humans fail to learn from the past? What can words refer to, when we have no sense of shared reality? “Hanoi Nagasaki Saigon Hiroshima/Keep saying it—it will sink in.//2019—here—again—no light at end of the tunnel//No Sign—” (78).

He and She live in an age of division—atomic and metaphoric: “We appeared in the age of fission:/vaporized bodies, ionized dragonflies, shadows printed on stone,” He says (69). Pangea, the ancient super-continent, becomes an image of a lost union between Pan and Gaea. Only a metaphoric bridge can rescue life on earth, it seems: “Pan and Gaea = bridging self with other” (71). But this has not happened. “We’re here//facing something//we can’t imagine” (79).

So how does all this end? “Earth = axis = spinning = two selves—swerve—possibility” (71). The “swerve” alludes to Lucretius, who suggested such a chance shift amid apparently inevitable dissolution was what allowed for life to arise in the first place. Light, love, movement: all appear in the poem’s final lines. When He mentions the sheen of light off the river, She responds, “Signifying something between souls./Love is both: the seam and the rock.//Dusk turns the hydrangeas deep blue” (89). Perhaps, finally, New York Trilogy is less a dismantling than a post-postmodern reframing of Arnold’s plea in Dover Beach, “Ah, love, let us be true/to one another!” In a final couplet attributed to neither He nor She (and sounding a bit like stage directions), the poem concludes, “The curtains are always moving—/light turns the hydrangea deep blue” (90). At this point, I think back to Miles Davis at the end of “Ozone Journal”—the blue of his blues, the emptiness from which “you can see anything.” “I still have the note Jerry left me on graph paper—” the speaker says there. ‘In utter emptiness, anything can take place.’ —Cage” (65). But the next step, it seems is up to us.

Brought together in a single volume, New York Trilogy’s three poems constitute an epic journey across geologic and historical time. Why under this title? New York is the dominant setting, and the word “trilogy” insists on the relatedness of its three parts. But most obviously, the title is an homage to Paul Auster’s 1987 The New York Trilogy. Auster, who died in 2024, worked with Balakian to start Writers against Trump, now called Writers for Democratic Action. Near the end of The New York Trilogy, Auster links his three stories through his narrator, who announces: “These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in an awareness of what it is about” (346). The same could be said of Balakian’s trilogy. It’s as if a camera began up close in “A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy” then moved back in “Ozone Journal” to cover a bigger chunk of history and finally in “No Sign” moved so far back the two speakers are scarcely visible as individuals. Instead, we get the vast expanse of planetary time and a chillingly clear vision of planetary extinction. “A quarter of all species heading into the black hole—” She says, and He: “what about the phyla of books, music, art, zigzag of buildings-to-God going in the slow ash—” (88).

Indeed. It breaks my heart to think of it. New York Trilogy challenges the reader with its disparities and discontinuities, its layering of voices and histories, but I can’t think how else a writer of Balakian’s intensity, interests, and integrity could have written right now.