Dancing in Odessa

“Odessa is everywhere,” writes Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminksky in his astonishing debut, Dancing in Odessa (2004, Tupelo Press). You may know him by the kerfuffle around his prescient and widely-misinterpreted poem, “We Lived Happily During the War,” which appears in his National Book Award and National Book Critics’ Circle Award- shortlisted second collection, Deaf Republic. Dancing in Odessa attempts to reassemble, on every page, and every place that this book is opened, from the rubble time and distance has made of it in his memory, a coastal Ukranian city from which Kaminsky and his family became refugees in 1993. This assembly and reassembly gains a kind of propulsive momentum, as if set to the music of Kaminsky’s lyric, or, indeed, like the title of the book’s third section, “Musica Humana”-- that of our human lives. It sounds like something your aunts and grandmothers danced to, it sounds like a generation erased, it is heartbreaking– and yet, reading, you are swept up into it, for, as Kaminsky writes, “we dance to keep from falling.”

Like the lineage of dissident poets he invokes across the collection– Joseph Brodsky, Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Isaac Babel, to name a few– and, indeed, like the current refugee Ukrainian poets whose safe passage and financial support Kaminsky has doggedly organized via Twitter, Kaminksy’s work as a poet is to devise “a human window” into a country where love, old music, daily embarrassments, and variously prepared fish existed among the horrors enacted by repressive regimes. The horrors of the past, Kaminsky says, compel him to write as if his hands have been set on fire. And while the horrors are ongoing? Our memories, too, are precious: “At night, I woke to whisper: Yes, we lived./ We lived, yes, don’t say it was a dream.” This prophetic book changed my life– it is the one to read now.