Nostalgia for the Future: New and Selected Poems, 1984-2024
By Gregory Djanikian
Green Writers Press
ISBN: 979-8-9904801-5-5
April 1, 2025
264 Pages
$19.95
For over forty years, Gregory Djanikian’s poetry has masterfully explored life’s in-between spaces.
Even a quick glance at the titles of many of his previous collections – The Man in The Middle, Falling Deeply into America, About Distance, Years Later, Sojourners of the In-Between – reveals just how often he navigates questions of liminality.
And throughout his career, so many of his poems have focused on journeys – along with their displacements and discoveries – that it is no surprise that the poems, themselves, often feel like journeys.
They wander. They get a little lost. They remind us what it feels like to feel “frazzled and deeply alert.”
Often, Djanikian’s poems have explored the immigrant experience and what it means to live between countries. But even when he roots his poems in a specific time and place, such as in Alexandria, 1953, the writing is filled with a sense of transience and possibility. You could think, the poem begins. You could feel…You could smell… You could season…You could drown.
Everything is conditional. Everything could change at any moment.
Because more often than not, Djanikian isn’t just describing a place. Instead, he is capturing the confusion of places. And with that, how displacement can lead us to a heightened sense of wonder and enchantment.
Often, the displacement comes from language, itself, such as in Immigrant Picnic, where, in trying to correct his parents’ use of American idioms, he finds himself:
…comparing words to fish now,
like the ones in the sea at Port Said,
or like birds among the date palms by the Nile,
unrepentantly elusive, wild.
But other times it simply comes from paying attention to those daily moments when:
You are somewhere between happiness
and sadness, you don’t know
where you are, but you think
that water is involved…
One of the things that I love most about Djanikian’s poems is the way that he reminds us that we are always changing, always becoming. This often comes through in small, anecdotal moments that quietly turn philosophical, such as when he describes his young ten-month old son, crawling around the house calling everything Daddy,
Bursting like signal flares
Telling me where he is,
What he’s found,
What I’ve next become.
The new poems in Nostalgia for the Future: New and Selected Poems, 1984-2024 continue to explore both new subjects and familiar themes.
In The Body is a Delicate Thing, the very first new poem in the book, Djanikian writes:
Even when the forces unloosen
and the body unbinds,
you will find its smudge
on everything it has touched,
the wineglass elm it leaned against one night
feeling the sanctuary of elms,
the window whose light shone like a moon
on the city streets of rivers and rain,
the body it lay beside feeling the weight of body,
the body it loved and the body that loved it
and the whisper of body in between.
The new poems explore some of the daily moments of one’s “later years” – forgetting what was said, navigating missteps and misstatements, the constant reminder that “Everything is waiting for an ending.”
But Djanikian never laments this. Instead, he writes with humor and grace. He continually remains open to surprise and new discoveries.
We’re walking down a street
so familiar to us
it’s as if we’re seeing it for the first time.
Or:
Everywhere I turn
there is an emissary from an untold world.
Not that he doesn’t recognize the pain of loss and the desire to hold onto things. In the final poem in the New Poems section, Later Years, Djankian addresses his wife:
I wish it could stay like this.
I wish goodbye were an archaic word
we could cross out without consequence,
something left over from the old languages.
I loved the new poems. But there is something about reading the collection as a whole that I found remarkably moving (in both senses of that word.)
Robert Frost supposedly said that if a book has 24 poems, the structure of the book should be the 25th poem. And as we turn the page from Later Years, (the final new poem) we’re suddenly traveling back in time – 40 years to be precise – to Djanikian’s first book, The Man in the Middle, and to a poem called The Journey, which, itself, travels back 75 years to Turkey, 1910.
This adds new meaning to the title of the collection – Nostalgia for the Future. Because as we travel back in time, we are returning to an earlier version of Djanikian’s voice, to a time when living in the present meant living between a distant past and an open future.
The pages that follow offer us a remarkable journey through Djanikian’s many books. His poems are filled with astonishment, historical reckoning, humor, and precision. They remind us of how to navigate our own bewildering transits.
And it is perhaps no surprise that the final poem in the book, Thankfulness, leads us, fittingly, to gratitude, and to the way that the arts continually returns us to the wonder of being alive and to those moments:
when you’re suddenly filled with gratitude
for being where you are, on the same planet
as someone who’s just played a genius note
or spoken a word that was never there
until it was.
Ben Berman is the author of three books of poems and the collection of essays, Writing While Parenting, a 2023 Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year. He has won the Peace Corps Award for the Best Book of Poetry, has been shortlisted twice for the Massachusetts Book Awards and has received awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, New England Poetry Club and Somerville Arts Council. He’s been teaching for twenty-five years and currently teaches creative writing classes at Brookline High School. He lives in the Boston area with his wife and two daughters.
