Communiqués by Maria Galina / Russian and English, bi-lingual edition
Translated by Anna Halberstadt & Ainsley Morse.
Cicada Press, New York. (2023-24) $22.00.
Those Absences Now Closest by Dzvinia Orlowsky
Carnegie Mellon Press, Pittsburgh. (2024) $20.00
Maria Galina (b. 1958) is an acclaimed Ukrainian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator. Born just outside of Moscow, she grew up in Ukraine and graduated from university in Odesa with a degree in marine biology. For several years she worked as a researcher in Moscow, but in 1994 she began to devote herself to her poetry and fiction. Writing in Russian, Galina has published several science-fiction novels, and seven collections of poetry, the last of which is Communiqués. After Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, Galina and her husband, Arkady Shtypel (also a Russian language poet) began dividing their time between Moscow and Odesa, and in February 2022, as the Russian invasion of the rest of Ukraine loomed, they decided to relocate to Odesa, come what may. They arrived just before the war began.
Galina wrote the poems in Communiqués during the days leading up to their decision. The first section of the book is “King of the Mountain,” a sequence of poems that in many ways dramatizes Ukraine’s long history of invasion and occupation. The poem consists of seven communiqués, and an endnote tells us that each poem “includes material taken from the reports of Guillaume le Vausseur de Beauplan,” a seventeenth century French artillery captain in the employ of Polish army who published a detailed description of the region and prepared equally detailed maps, in effect working on behalf of one of the historic colonizers of Ukraine. What he says in the speeches that begin each of Galina’s communiqués is, in part, derived from those reports.
“Communiqué No. 5,” for example, gives us Beauplan’s impressions of the character traits of native Ukrainians:
the locals
are industrious brave straightforward strong of spirit resourceful
honest
and above all else they prize freedom however
at the same time they are treacherous cunning unreliable greedy
and lazy
In each of the seven communiqués, Beauplan’s opening speech is followed by a rejoinder from one or more of the locals. “No. 5” includes a rejoinder that celebrates nature and its capacity to renew itself and the speaker’s hopes for outlasting the invaders. This section of the communiqué begins as a prayer to a pagan image, a winged bull:
Bring forth the apple blossoms
Plait the fine lace tighter
Water that brings youth
Buried living in the earth
We are stronger still
In the angled moonlight
Holding up the vault
All that is invisible glows
All who were murdered live
Galina’s book depends in large part on assembling and juxtaposing multiple voices. “Goryenna,” the next poem, brings us to Goryenna, an imaginary mountain where a retreat for the bourgeoisie provides relief from the stresses of life, including the threat of war. The mountain could be in Ukraine or Russia, but the portrait of those gathered there is not flattering. On Goryenna one may, like one of the lawyers we meet, wish for “just five more minutes of melting, lazy bliss.” The ghosts of murdered innocents might well wander the surrounding hillsides, we are told, but on Goryenna no one seems to notice. Everyone agrees that “the local Chianti isn’t bad.” All is not well, however. We learn of children who have trouble sleeping and mothers who cannot console them. Marriages are on the rocks. Giant storm clouds seem to rise on every horizon. The one feeling everyone shares, as one character puts it at the end of this poem, is that something is “about to crack / our chrysalis of common fate.”
“Other Poems,” the next section of Communiqués, is also built out of an assemblage of voices. These poems show an ever-increasing level of anxiety and dread. By comparison to what preceded them, these “other poems” are near frantic, mired in emotional turmoil. In the science fiction found in “Raspberry Bushes,” a man sets off on a space journey and returns over a hundred years later to see what little is left of his nation and culture. As he receives awards from the prime minister, he wants to take out a “pocket annihilator,” presumably to blow the whole damned thing up. Later in the poem a woman, presumably from an invasion force from another planet, speaks in horror about the “locals” and marvels at their propensity for violence. Having seen what she can, she declares, “Call back the landing crafts, / This earth kills even its own…”
Given Galina’s highly regarded science-fiction novels, it is not surprising that some version of sci-fi might slip into her poetry. It’s hard not to think of these as allegorical versions of Ukraine’s relations with Russia. In “Dancer in the Dark,” the hinted at and imminent “alien” invasion generates a genuine and painful cri de cœur. To be steeped in fear, to internalize it, to be uprooted and displaced, to be bewildered and tormented by uncertainties great and small are, for Galina, the psychological and spiritual costs of life at war:
Oh the technicolor dreams we dream!
All of us children of war,
persons displaced,
seeking vainly to be placed,
to be rooted,
to be rested,
to go clear,
finally to lose the fear.
“Letters from Odesa,” the concluding section of Communiqués, consists of a series of Facebook postings from Feb. 23, 2022, the day before the invasion began. The book ends with a posting on June 15. At the start they are in Russian, but over time Galina writes entries in Russian and Ukrainian, and the translators tell us that she now posts exclusively in Ukrainian. Both languages use the Cyrillic alphabet, so to help the reader (including this reviewer) who does not know either language, the translators decided to “gray-out” the Russian and keep the Ukrainian entries in a darker script. It is an ingenious solution and conveys the difficult liminality of a writer whose art, and many life-long friendships, are rooted in the language of the nation attacking Ukraine.
However, these Facebook entries are not polemical. Mostly they are spare, informational prose, daily bulletins from a war zone. Galina does nonetheless get impatient with tepid Russian opposition to the war, especially among writers and artists. Despite the casual, prosy feel of these postings, they can be read as one long prose poem, each posting a stanza about resilience. They all begin with a greeting to her Facebook friends, and it’s always a variation on the one for March 5, 2022: “Good Morning. We’re still here.” The purpose of the postings is of course to reassure friends that the poet and her husband are “fine” or “ok,” especially after bombs have fallen. Galina also makes many trenchant observations about the true nature of this war, how it has no front or rear areas, how civilians are targeted everywhere, how nothing will ever be the same after so much death and destruction. Overall, what stays with the reader is that feeling of “we’re still here.” The phrase conveys not only a fact, but is a commitment to continue to stay. One can almost imagine these postings as representing a collective voice. The “we” who are still there are Galina and her husband, but also the people of Ukraine. Galina continues to post on Facebook to this day, though her husband died in October, 2024. Since then she’s used a slightly different salutation—“New day, new morning”—to express this feeling of being still there no matter what.
~
Dzvinia Orlowsky is an award-winning Ukrainian-American poet and a highly regarded translator, editor, and teacher. The daughter of parents who emigrated from Ukraine in 1950, she grew up in rural Ohio, graduated from Oberlin College, and later earned an MFA from Warren Wilson. She continues to teach creative writing in several New England colleges. She has translated and co-translated work by Ukrainian poets such as Natalka Bilotserkivets and Halyna Kruk. Like Galina, she is the author of seven books of her own poetry. Orlowsky’s most recent book, Those Absences Now Closest, probes the familial and cultural legacy that comes with Ukrainian identity. These poems document her search for ways to affirm a meaningful rootedness and at the same time claim her own individual identity and independence.
Orlowsky begins Those Absences Now Closest with her translation of a particularly rich passage from The Enchanted Desna, an autobiographical novella by Oleksandr Dovzhenko (1894-1956). Dovzhenko is best known as a filmmaker, and the novella (1955) and the film (1964) of the same name capture his boyhood in and around his family’s farmlands along the Desna, a river that flows from Russia to Kyiv, where it joins the Dnipro. In this excerpt, Dovzhenko catalogues the many things he as a boy found “unpleasant” or “pleasant.” It is unpleasant, for instance, when a leech attaches itself to his leg, but it is pleasant to wade in warm puddles after a storm. His list of “pleasant” things leads to a list of what he loved: the way his grandfather spoke to horses as if they were human, the “cry-croak” of frogs, the thud of an apple falling in the orchard. The passage brims with joy in life and the natural world, as seen through an alert and curious child’s eye.
What follows this opening is Orlowsky’s response, a sequence of poems titled “The (Dis)enchanted Desna.” Here is a somewhat grimmer and definitely more realistic version of life along the Desna. Orlowsky says these poems are “after Dovzhenko,” but “in a time of Putin.” The sequence opens with “Desolate,” and the poem sounds like a portrait of Putin or maybe a lower-level henchman. The poet leaves the matter ambiguous. “He had no soul, only steam,” she writes, and “he had no voice, only drones.” In another of these poems we see the body of a deceased great-grandmother laid out on a kitchen bench while she gets measured for a coffin. Whether set in the past or the present, the image is of hardship and poverty. And as for the beauties of farm life, Orlowsky says it just doesn’t exist anymore. “Scythes” concludes the sequence, and in it the poet tells us the swishing sound of the scythe reaping the grains at harvest is gone forever.
I was surprised to turn the page and find an “Epilog” using the same passage from Dovzhenko that we met in the “Prolog.” This time, however, most of the passage is grayed out. A handful of words scattered throughout remain in dark ink, and together they form an erasure poem: “Trembling / doesn’t / stop / to know / your bare hands / to walk around / the darkness / to lie / heavy with /songs.” Carved from Dovzhenko’s prose, this is Orlowsky’s feeling that the darkness in whatever form it comes is a burden, that trembling in fear weighs heavily on the impulse to sing.
In the next section, Orlowsky gives us nine centos based on the poetry of Serhiy Zhadan, a prolific contemporary Ukrainian poet, novelist, essayist, and singer who fronts his own rock band. Each cento is an assemblage of various lines taken from Zhadan’s 2019 selected poems, What We Live For, What We Die For. Some of Orlowsky’s centos are composed out of the opening lines in Zhadan’s poetry, others from closing lines, and others from various lines in between. Shuffling and reassembling the lines of poetry into a new and different poem often highlights certain dimensions of the originals. In her centos Orlowsky focuses on Zhadan’s sense that a deadly cataclysm is coming. The second one is based on the eighth lines assembled from several Zhadan poems where he speaks of “Blown up bodies. / In times of peace they were just considered members of a sect. // Now we smell the burning even in our dreams.” That smell recurs in Cento 5, a poem made of Zhadan’s closing lines: “And really—it is nothing, / the smell of corpses.” Orlowsky is telling us that this poetry was a meaningful and prophetic song, even if profoundly disenchanted.
If the first half of Those Absences Now Closest is about probing Orlowsky’s relation to her Ukrainian literary legacy, the second half of Orlowsky’s book is focused on her coming of age and how she negotiated her way within a Ukrainian familial legacy. The title of the whole collection comes from the closing lines of “Two Solitudes,” a deeply moving poem about Orlowsky’s grandmother who doted on the poet as an infant. Orlowsky remembers being held in her grandmother’s arms, but now, as an adult, she cannot help but wonder if her grandmother was cradling a son who twenty years prior had disappeared into the Soviet gulag. “Was it me she loved, me she held?” asks the poet. Or was it “those absences // now closest to him.” The past can indeed inhabit the present, and an embrace, no matter how loving, can also create “two solitudes.” In “Prayer for the Heart,” another poem from the book’s second half brings us another grandmother, this time one who was not able to flee Ukraine. Here a rhetorical question seems central to the whole collection. “What holds us / to the colorless burn / / of family— / who wake in another skin, unhealed.” The colorless burn, the waking inside the skin of another, with that person unhealed is a compelling image describing intergenerational trauma.
This second half of the book is not fixated on the remote past. “War” and “Breaking News” are poems explicitly concerned with the contemporary Russian invasion. The latter of the two dramatizes how we would rather water the peonies than think about the war, and yet regardless of what we want, the war breaks into consciousness.
Imagine three birds at night
calling out to their mates
I made it! I’m still here!
In the meantime a woman lies
trapped under the rubble
of a nine-story building. Everyone’s
praying she’s still alive
Prayer is hope
But what is hope other than guess work . . .
As with Galina, Orlowsky’s “still here” underlines a recurrent sensibility for resilience and survival. In “Night Rain,” another portrait of her grandmother, Orlowsky tells us her grandmother smoked Camels, maybe drank some vodka while she “religiously” watched the Friday Night Fights on television. To the poet coming of age this grandmother was a fighter. And when she died, Orlowsky writes, it was as if she had “left the ring.”
With these forebears in mind, and perhaps because of them, Orlowsky examines the evolution of her own sense of independence. She grew up in the era of the Beatles, and their “Back in the USSR,” which celebrated beautiful “Ukraine girls” that “leave the West behind.” For a teenaged child of immigrants, the song carried a profoundly affirmative message. Likewise, a little later, with Jimi Hendrix’s “The Wind Cried Mary,” Orlowsky’s poem of the same name captures the sadness that comes with feeling trapped in a failing relationship. This poem leads us to “No Coming Back,” the last poem in the book, when the poet dwells on the moment when her divorce papers are put in the mail. In some fundamental way, the generations of women in this family have passed on to this poet an inspiring sense of independence and self-reliance.
It’s fair to say there is a fundamental feminist dimension to Orlowsky’s Those Absences Now Closest. The arc of this collection goes back to Ukrainian literature, but the emphasis going forward is the forging of an independent self that neither rejects nor is subservient to a cultural and familial legacy. Galina’s Communiqués is more tacitly feminist, but I cannot help but feel that “King of the Mountain” is a poem that opposes and resists not only imperial militarism, but also the kind of male hierarchy it implies. In addition to that poem, we cannot forget that the postings of “Letters from Odessa” are words of a woman who has forged her own independence and claimed her cultural heritage. Both of these books offer us portraits of women who have shaped their respective destinies. Both poets in differing ways are women who are still here. Their stories are not over yet.
Fred Marchant
Fred is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Said Not Said (Graywolf Press). He is also the editor of Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford (Graywolf), and with Nguyen Ba Chung has co-translated works by several contemporary Vietnamese poets. An emeritus professor of English, he is the Founding Director of the Poetry Center at Suffolk University in Boston.
