Review: Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

Deaf Republic
Poems by Ilya Kaminsky
Graywolf Press, March 2019
$16.00, 96 pp.
978-1555978310

Kaminsky’s much awaited second book is a reverential ballad to the silences during war when we can find love. Given the state of affairs, the constant fighting and our global awareness of that strife, we are all finding time to love during war. Entering this book is like entering the narrative of sleepers who waken into a global realization of humanity at its best and worst.

In Ilya’s narrative, we can “live happily during the war.” In this book, we have kill shots and dead shots and next to them, “You are alive.” Life and death crouch beside each other in this poetic narrative like two doves on a wire. In the same poem there is, “the deaf boy . . .” and “the body of the boy . . .” and “lifting birds off the water.” The birds and the sky lift away leaving the body on the pavement, and then of course it comes, as we knew it would, a wedding in war and sex and desire.

War rips at the bodice of humanity; and at our inability to stop it. It’s “we” in this collection, because we are all victims, victimizers and those who stand around and watch. In the Rodney King video, those three groups exist. While cruelty happens, the watchers do not interfere, and in this book, the watchers are all of us. There is so much love and lilt of morning in this poetry of violence.  The poetry itself is a pause, a silence between rage and war.

Kate Gale is the editor of the Los Angeles Review and founder of Red Hen Press in Pasadena, California.