"Deaf republic" by Ilya Kaminsky (Graywolf, 2019)

Poems from American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Review (UK), etc! Until I read the reviews I didn't know that the author (born in the Soviet Union, now in the States) was deaf for a long time, and that this is his first book for 15 years. Reviews point out that the bookend poems make us look for parallels in contemporary USA (not hard, when the final poem includes "I watch neighbours open their phones to watch a cop demanding a man's driving license. When the man reaches for his wallet, the cop shoots". Most quote "Silence is the invention of the hearing". There are some sign-language drawings - an invented language.

I don't often like long or single-scenario poems - too little variety. This has a "Dramatis Personae" page, itself poetic. There's a narrative, but also many lyrical asides about the puppeteers and their expected child. Act one begins with "Our country is the stage". An illegal puppet show is put on by Sonya and Alfonso. A deaf boy, Petya, is shot by the occupying forces because he doesn't follow the order to disperse (instead he spat at the sergeant). The others then feign deafness as a form of protest.

"Soldiers drag Petya up the stairs and homeless dogs, thin as philosophers, understand everything and bark and bark" (p.20) "Sonya and Alfonso teach signs in Central Square. When a patrol walks by, they sit on their hands" (p.22). The deaf are arrested. Sonya gives birth. 3 days later she's arrested. Soldiers spit in her eyes. She's killed by firing squad in the square. Alfonso kills a soldier. Act One ends with his hanging. "What is silence? Something of the sky in us".

Act Two starts with "Momma Galya Armolinskaya, 53, is having more sex than any of us". She yells "Deafness isn't an illness! It's a sexual position!" She steals Sonya and Alfonso's baby while Alfonso's body's still hanging. One of her puppeteers lure a soldier with sex and kills them. Galya raises the baby as her own. "I am not deaf/ I simply told the world// to shut off its crazy music for a while." The soldiers burn shops and arrest women. They shoot 50 of them. "Body, they blame you for all things and they/ seek in the body what does not live in the body". Relatives of the dead blame Galya and take the baby from her. "Years later, some will say none of this happened ... And yet, on some nights, townspeople ... teach their children to sign ... Don't be afraid, a child signs to a tree, a door."

The compression of the imagery results in surrealist effects. There's a lot of paradox. That too is often the result of unpackable compression - "Sometimes at night I// light a lamp so as not/ to see" (p.41)

Other reviews

• Richard Osler (I have read poetry books that have a narrative thread, but none as captivating as Kaminsky’s. Narrative is important, yes, but it must elevate, not degrade the poetic, the lyric value of the work. It must not fall into lineated prose. See here how the narrative supports the lyric leaps that blow the focus of the poem wide open.)
• Will Brewbaker (Though fictional Vasenka may exist in an unknown, Soviet-esque country, we would be wise to map our own “falling” America onto the story. In the same way, we must map ourselves onto the story. ... Kaminsky asks us to accept both propositions at once: that the town has chosen deafness as a form of resistance — and also that the opening scene’s tragedy has somehow rendered the town deaf. ... a final poem — “In a Time Of Peace” — serves as a kind of bookend-sequel to “We Lived Happily During The War.” Unfortunately, without the lens of fictional narrative, much of this last poem feels like being tapped repeatedly on the shoulder and asked whether we’ve “gotten” the book’s analogy between Vasenka and contemporary America. Nevertheless, the final stanza of “In a Time of Peace” — for all of the poem’s heavy-handedness — delivers one of the finest moments in recent contemporary American poetry: I do not hear gunshots, ...)
• Michael Sutton
• Stav Poleg (The two stages— the public stage which manifests itself in terror and fear, where the citizens are the central characters, the audience, or both, and the stage of the puppet theatre, the one that brings joy and relief as well as resistance— often merge in dark, unsettling images.)
• Annik Adey-Babinski
• Daniel Moysaenko (language and silence illuminate and complicate these political issues, rattling the distinction between public and private, West and East, past and present.)