Air Raid

People still wake there
alive    living     ablaze.

The Siege of Leningrad, the Nazi death camps, and the Gulag are more than mere historical events for the Russian poet Polina Barskova. Their terrible fires still burn, “alive,” “ablaze,” leaving behind the dark burden of a poet: “the garbage of horror, despair’s filth, / vain, adorned, and duende’d, I / carry to You.” A native-born Leningrader teaching literature in the United States, Barskova knows from childhood experience and her work in the Siege archives what it means to “[w]atch this clean-freak of an epoch / wipe us up like dust, to the last speck of us.” Barskova turns the victims, “traceless in history,” into the material of a death-centered poetry, in which art permits the dead to spin a consolatory fabric of witness:

Their journey has just begun,
not ended, they stand
for poetry and weave their thread.

In a fascinating conversation with the author appended to the book, translator Valzhyna Mort explains the “creative license” in her versions as a heightened “semantic fidelity” to the “strange and disruptive” freedom of Barskova’s language. Russian-inflected endearments (“Sweetpoochkins,” “Darling girlkins”), neologisms (“Leninburg,” “widowlette”), portmanteaus (“dystrophtchiks,” “Whyever”), and high-energy internal rhyme and sound-making (“Our Masha / brain-mashed,” “The city buzzed gnashed murmured tickled”) gorgeously “rip” through the clay of Barskova’s “pottery/poetry,” collapsing each vessel “under the pressure of Word.”

The beauty of Air Raid resides in the way the Siege informs all of Barskova’s anatomies of mortality, not just her tender and ironic tales of the now-distant era. From a starkly feminist commentary on Turgenev and a melancholy, modern version of Catullus, to poems about her “friendly divorce” and new partnership with someone “with a weak spot for cemeteries,” Barskova lets us hear the silence in a world persisting after great catastrophe:

This is a cemetery of silence
a silent togetherness of the earth.
I’m pinned by this strange silence 
post-pain, post-love.