★★★★★ 5
A brilliant poetic narrative whose lines leap off the pages which turn themselves.
Format: Paperback
When you get to the end, you wonder how Kaminsky worked his wondrous magic, how it's possible to think and write poetry like that. The poem is a story about Vasenka, a mythical town somewhere in the Ukraine, occupied by the Soviet army during an unspecified period of time. It is an allegory of the cruelty of occupation, the futility of the resistance of a few, and the deafness of the silent majority, a deafness that courageously resists the occupation and a deafness that hardens the heart and ignores the evil surrounding them. It could have happened anywhere anytime. The occupiers could have been Nazis, Ottoman Turks, American, English, or Spanish. The poetry is piercingly sharp, visionary, breathless and the metaphors are the likes of which you've never heard before, lines like “the sound we do not hear lifts the gulls off the water,” “Our hearing doesn't weaken, but something silent in us strengthens,” or “In these avenues, deafness is our only barricade.” This is drop-dead beautiful poetry.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 22, 2019
