By Dzvinia Orlowsky
Carnegie Mellon University Press
2024, 96 pages,
$20.00
The passages of Those Absences Now Closest, Dzvinia Orlowsky’s eighth collection of poems, are steeped in traumatic elegy, remembrances that bind the personal and the global, from long-lost relatives to the specter of a repeatedly-plundered Ukrainian homeland now battered anew in a fresh cycle of war. As a first-generation Ukrainian-American, Orlowsky occupies a unique perch of witness, having seen firsthand the effects of the mid-twentieth-century trauma that her parents bore with them to America. She now observes this new round of totalitarian violence, often through the lens of recent and contemporary Ukrainian literary voices she has immersed herself in, at times using their words in translation to gain entry to a world we often gloss over in a blur of dreary news clips and headlines. The result is a breathtaking range of poems: clear-eye and fantastical, intimate and horrific, always indelible.
The haunting title of the book emerges from a poem midway through the collection, “Two Solitudes,” which begins:
My grandmother named me poor orphan
The one her daughter could no longer carry,
Delivered weeks early into her arms.
Keeper of birds with damaged wings…
There are layers to these dual solitudes, from the neglected infant Orlowsky and her grandmother who still grieves a son interred in a Siberian labor camp decades earlier, to the separate enigmas of distant homeland and the often incomprehensible world of exile. The poem ends:
Was it me she loved, me she held?
Or those absences
now closest to him.
Orlowsky’s precise language invites us into the ambiguities of her carried experience.
Orlowsky is a gifted translator with a deep awareness of contemporary Ukrainian literature, having collaborated in the curation of several collections of Ukrainian poets in translation, including the award-winning Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow by Natalka Bilotserkivets. She brings these gifts to bear in Those Absences Now Closest through sampling works by writers not well known by Western readers, using the material to build new, evocative poetic works. She opens the book with “Prolog,” a passage from a novella by the early twentieth-century Ukrainian writer Oleksandr Dovshenko, which she translated. The passage is a series of pastoral litanies of things unpleasant (“barking dogs,” “walk[ing] barefoot over wheat stubs”); things pleasant (“the smell of drying grain’); and things the author loved (“swallows in barns,” “…when out of the darkness on the road, a voice called out, ‘Peace to you!’…”), evoking a more innocent rural existence that was crushed by Stalinism and World War. Later, she returns to this passage in “Epilog,” an erasure poem where the majority of the original words are rendered in a bleach of gray, leaving this broken sentence: “Trembling rain doesn’t stop to know your bare hands to walk around the darkness to lie heavy with songs.” After famine, after Soviet repression and a succession of wars, this is what she has left to bear witness with.
The question of how to bear authentic witness to such monstrous waves of trauma seems a central task to Orlowsky, and she approaches the problem with a variety of strategies. In the second section of the book, she leans into her familiarity with contemporary Ukrainian poetry by composing a series of nine centos with lines drawn from a recent collection by the poet Serhiy Zhadan, What We Live For, What We Die For. The cento is a risky form, as the poet’s job is to construct something fresh out of received lines composed by another, and Orlowsky compounds the difficulty by building her arrangements exclusively out of lines from a particular number in the sequence of Zhadan’s lines. So, her first poem is based only on opening lines from poems in his collection; another, on ninth lines; another, on thirteenth lines; the final poem in her sequence, on his closing lines. The conceit could easily feel gimmicky and restrictive, but Orlowsky’s centos feel authentic, urgently building on Zhadan’s corpus of experience to say something about her own:
Take only what is most important. Take the letters,
the dark shattered wicked winter.
You hear everything passing,
stories connected with murders, knife wounds.
and:
And really—it is nothing.,
the smell of corpses
will say there’s no reason to write about this at all.
The first section of the Those Absences Now Closest is also a poetic sequence, titled “The (Dis)enchanted Desna.” The Desna is a major tributary of the Dneiper River, which runs through the Ukrainian heartland, and “Desna” in Old Slavic means “right hand.” The parenthetical “Dis” of the sequence title suggests an after and a before, and an epigraph notes that the poems, inspired once more by Oleksandr Dovshenko, exist “in a time of Putin.” These poems are fantastical and elemental: scenes and characters drawn from some archetypal rural village setting, imbued with an underlying aura of trauma:
He had no soul, only steam,
no eyes, only two frying pans
no mouth, only a daub of red,
no throat, only a chimney
that choked him,
no God, only a candle
placed upside down
or:
Listen for the snow’s slow dripping
from thatched roofs. It’ll sound
like intermittent tears
a broken circle, a drumming,
bird song pause…
and:
The village crow knew everything—
whose son fathered young partisans,
guns like large broken wishbones
pressed to their chests
Other commentators have noted that the striking images in this sequence possess Chagall-like qualities, flying up off the page and out of the quotidian in startling trajectories. The effect is to engage the reader in a visceral level of subconscious witness, not bound by personal narrative or historical statistics, but by navigating an emotional landscape of image and texture.
In subsequent poems, Orlowsky tackles the role of witness more directly. “Breaking News” addresses the current invasion of Ukraine: “Seven months in / no one reports the bombings anymore.” The poem “War” is a litany of casualties in increments of 100, prompted by a Google search (“How many deaths must it take to be considered a war?” Answer: 1,000 lives). She balances global observations with meticulously-framed family events. “The Last Goodbye” is a harrowing and tender recounting of her father’s final cancer-wracked moments. “Beets & Turnips & Kale” is a snapshot of disconnect between Ukrainian and American cultures, as a teen cashier is dumbfounded by the strange vegetables sliding down his checkout conveyor belt. In “Pitchfork: Ohio, 1978,” Orlowsky recalls her teenaged-self planted barefoot on her driveway, brandishing the farm tool to fend off a condescending, ogling trio of malpractice lawyers who had come to deliver the decision on her father’s work compensation claim, long after he had died. “Without Makeup” is a love letter to her sister, on the realization that they are the last two remaining of their family of origin:
Something has washed the mascara away,
Vaseline-rubbed your lashes.
You call it tired, unmotivated, grouchy-looking,
apologize for apologizing.
I’m just beginning to see—
spring grass under snow.
deciding which green.
In the West, the war in Ukraine too often feels to us to be incomprehensible, intractable, a compendium of atrocities and statistics beyond our grasp. In Those Absences Now Closest, Orlowsky has built a platform out of precise, wide-ranging lyric language, so that we can witness alongside of her the precious strands of humanity that persist through war, exile, and generational trauma. These are poems that will remain embedded deep in our consciousness.
Robbie Gamble’s essays have appeared in Scoundrel Time, Pangyrus, Pithead Chapel, Under the Gum Tree and Tahoma Literary Review. He was a 2019 Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Summer Writers Workshop. He worked many years as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston, and now divides his time between Massachusetts and Vermont.
