By way of parable, international crises loom over the voices, narratives, and images of Ilya Kaminsky’s second collection of poetry, Deaf Republic. Throughout the work—comprised of a two-act drama that weaves different personas and narrators, prose poems, lyrics, and captioned sign-language illustrations of hands—a US reader may hear echoes of the varied and contradictory 24-hour news cycle. In particular, she may be led to recall US/Mexico border detainment, be reminded of recent protests, or make note of the references to police killings of Black men, women, and children. Another reader, however, influenced by the poet’s biography and the book’s cultural particulars, will draw parallels to past or ongoing conflicts in Eastern Europe, specifically in Russia and Ukraine. World War II and Soviet-era purges or current territorial disputes inflamed by occupation, misinformation, and nationalism may come to mind. For Deaf Republic, language and silence illuminate and complicate these political issues, rattling the distinction between public and private, West and East, past and present.
Within the drama, set in the fictional town of Vasenka, a deaf boy, Petya, is shot by a soldier stationed there to “protect our freedom,” and the whole town goes deaf in solidarity, as protest or insurgency. Soon after, Petya’s puppeteer cousin Sonya gets married, a child is born, citizens and family members are arrested and publicly executed, puppeteers seek revenge, and soldiers retaliate. Of course, such summation of narrative is a reductive, inaccurate description of what these poems do. Kaminsky’s work carries a unique quality of fury, elation, and beauty—that is, heightened awareness and sensation. Kaminsky perceives, creates, forms, and reforms connections to attend to the capaciousness of experience. He likewise layers systems of images and metaphors, demonstrating the impossibility of exact repetition: the interdependence and temporal flux of perceptions and ideas.
Deaf Republic’s play with figurative language is especially striking. From grief to an ecstatic, near-devotional appreciation of living, the poems manage to use metaphor and simile to crack into a situation’s mystery without self-consciousness, without announcing it as tactic. One poem follows a mourner after a funeral: “in snow-drifted streets, I stand like a flagpole // without a flag.” The simile functions to physically describe a lone, stationary figure, all the while speaking to the stripped nature of the mourner’s psyche, now raw, featureless, and devoid of some purposeful element. More importantly, the simile, especially in its allusion to the figure as nationless, remains simple and clear. Kaminsky’s figurative imagery regularly clarifies complication while reflecting and generating awe. “You will find me, God,” the speaker says, “like a dumb pigeon’s beak, I am / pecking / every which way at astonishment.” This construction reverses the typical search for God and situates the speaker as snapping up morsels of astonishment as sustenance.
Throughout the work, parts of the nonhuman world likewise hum in their relationship to one another. As the speaker carries laundry home, in a gust, “the wind is helpless / with desire to touch these tiny bonnets and socks.” That gentle tactility is met elsewhere with different ways of touching, erotic or destructive. “While helicopters bomb the streets, whatever they will open, will open. / What is silence? Something of the sky in us,” the speaker declares. Silence is that which cannot be opened, being apart from the tangible, untouched by bombs and even their noise.
Vulnerable and unprepared, the days in May, like young men, “walk to prisons, / overcoats / thrown over their pajamas.” This comparison recalls, for me, Anna Akhmatova’s “Instead of a Preface” from her elegy Requiem. Akhmatova stands in line outside the prison where her son is held, and a woman in the crowd “with lips blue from the cold” recognizes her and asks, “can you describe this?” to which the poet responds, “I can.” So can Kaminsky. One poem follows a widower as he drinks his way through town and
spray-paints on the sea wall:
people live here—
like an illiterate
signing a document
he does not understand.
Here, the figurative illiterate does not understand context or the proposed agreement, nor perhaps how to sign the document. This estrangement from content feels particularly apt as an exploration of the dumb shock of violence and mourning. Yet the desire and attempt to communicate continues.
In Deaf Republic, sign-language illustrations repeat. One for “match,” for example—an index finger poised in another hand’s open, waving palm—recurs as similes and images revise associations with an unlit, lit, or extinguished match. Many other signs, derived from Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, American, and invented Sign Language, a note tells us, similarly enrich Kaminsky’s text. After a poem’s final line, “A vegetable kiosk explodes, a tomato flies toward us and falls apart in the wind,” two sets of illustrated hands depict “story”: hands together at the pinkies, palm-up and open, followed by hands clasped closed, like a book or tomato splitting and reforming mid-air. Kaminsky’s innovation rethinks Sign Languages’ gestural and visual relation to objects and concepts while supplying a metaphor for the poem’s imagery.
Beyond this multiplicity and hybridity, the book’s investigation of the concept of silence ironically resonates. A note informs readers that “The deaf don’t believe in silence. Silence is the invention of the hearing.” This way refigured for many of the hearing, silence takes on valances—environmental and behavioral. And it combines with watching in a particularly powerful way. “The crowd watches. // The children watch us watch:” an atrocity, one poem mentions, for instance. One’s complacency and treatment of horror as spectacle becomes starker when seen second-hand by a witness of witness. As Aimé Césaire wrote, “life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear.” The poet decries a spectator existence, in which the act of witnessing divorced of action becomes entertainment. Though it is often said that one must not be silent in the face of injustice, Kaminsky shows there is no such thing as silence; instead, there are reactions that are private, social, etc. For example, when a soldier shoots a deaf boy, the gun’s firing deafens the whole town so that “The sound we do not hear lifts the gulls off the water.” In other words, such deafness directs all attention. The speaker even feels blessed, saying, “thank you for deafness, / Lord, such fire // from a match you never lit.” Silence emerges as nuanced and active. And what may seem to be an absence becomes palpable, useful: “deafness is our only barricade.”
While a barricade can be a beneficial defense, closeness seems equally necessary. “Silence like a dog sniffs the windowpanes between us,” trying to understand, through a different sense, transparent though real barriers. The windows allow a visual form of connection but disallow physical closeness, a fundamental and comforting bond. Sex can be a distracting preamble to control as some of the book’s puppeteers carry out planned attacks. But, more importantly, eroticism becomes a vital part of domestic partnership in the collection, with differing forms of it illuminating complexities of love. As an infant Anushka sleeps, the parents take a bath:
Soaping together
is sacred to us.
Washing each other’s shoulders.
You can fuck
anyone—but with whom can you sit
in water?
Such intimacy seems to spill across the page, from one instance or another, as if to soften and accentuate the violence happening nearby. Four soldiers throw a main character to the sidewalk and spray him with firehoses; neighbors watch him scream and be taken away, “and no one stands up. Our silence stands up for us.” While the book shows the political, public, and private to be melded, this coexistence of romantic joy and brutality is not merely a dramatization of pain’s everydayness. In this way it is not unlike W. H. Auden’s famous ekphrastic poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” on Icarus’s falling from the sky juxtaposed with a ploughman’s apathy and a ship that “Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Here, tragedy touches each person. So does foolishness and laughter. But not all citizens go about their days, ignoring others’ tragedies; some do merely watch, while some take action and suffer more, and some survive. The gift of Deaf Republic is that it reminds us to feel and react. The speaker instructs, in a time of war, “Watch— / Vasenka citizens do not know they are evidence of happiness. // […] a ripped-out document of laughter.”
And in a time of peace, or what would be considered one, violence persists. The pressure of history does not ease up. An imperialist, genocidal, and intolerant past seems to reassert itself, making Eastern Europe’s present and future especially precarious now, although its situation is not unique. Referring to the United States, the speaker in the collection’s final poem claims, “Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement / for hours.” The speaker further points out: “I do not hear gunshots, / but watch birds splash over the backyards of the suburbs”, with a silence that does not preclude awareness of gunshots and with a sense of peace and beauty not untroubled, not untouched by guilt and gratitude: “How bright is the sky (forgive me) how bright.”
Beyond his encyclopedic command of global poetic tradition and technical prowess as a poet, Kaminsky epitomizes that centuries-long role by showing us what we had not noticed or had chosen to forget. And in that moment of recognition, readers must confront it, as much as when a door opens into the room in which you are sleeping.