One Night We Will No Longer Bear the Ocean (Reviewed by Andrew Periale)

ELJ Editions; Standard Edition (June 11, 2024)   

ISBN-10 ‏: ‎ 1942004710 , ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-1942004714,

available through ELJ, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble

Anton Yakovlev’s latest book of poems, One Night We Will No Longer Bear the Ocean, is, on the one hand, difficult. That is, the meaning of the lines are not obvious – lexical Rubik’s Cubes that need to be turned ‘round and ‘round before their intent becomes clear. On the other hand the poems are easy, the way opening a great heap of presents on Christmas morning is easy for a child – one delight after another along with the knowledge that the toys unboxed can be played with (the clothes worn, the books read) time after time from the initial delight in their newness through to something familiar and, finally, treasured.

The collection is divided into four sections, with thirteen poems in each section. There is, however, an introductory poem that lets readers know what they are in for. In it we meet a couple, sitting on opposite corners of the bed, facing away from each other. What are they doing there? Are they simply tired from the long flight?

It was dusk, and the statue of Edward Snowden

was working overtime to track the deletions

in my last email to you.

All those words I had refused. [At the Airport Hotel, p 3]

The narrator wrote his love an email, and not an easy one. But why Snowden, the CIA operative who exposed our global surveillance network? It wasn’t Snowden, though, but a statue of that whistleblower. Only Russia would erect a statue to Snowden. Yakovlev, originally from Moscow, chooses his words carefully. “Refused,” is a weighted word in Russia. “Refuseniks” were denied the right to emigrate from the old Soviet Union. Here the poet has refused to let certain words go out with the email. The narrator had deleted words before sending his email, yet they did not completely disappear, but were still there on the bed:

…slowly

crawling off the edges,

stinging our bare feet.

And so the collection begins. Throughout the fifty-two poems, Yakovlev refers to both the “we” that was and the “you” that is now apart. (Though, as with the meaning of any given line, the state of their relationship is not obvious.) At times it seems as if the other has perished. At other times, she is living just across the street. Now she seems like a callous human, the cruelest of tormentors, while elsewhere she seems more like Goethe’s Ewig-Weibliche – the eternal feminine. I feel that I will be turning that Rubik’s Cube through many more readings.

            Even if I knew the meaning of these poems, I would not tell you. Where is the fun in that? This isn’t a Masters Thesis after all, it is an enticement to read this collection out of all the other collections published this year, and, anyway, meaning isn’t everything. What about emotion? What about music?

Certainly there is – or was – joy in the relationship:

And all the cashiers in the chocolate store loved us.

No occasion to dream of poison. So much was said

through eye contact, even when there was none.

Our little corner welcomed blossoms while

we sat speed reading. [Anxiety, p 10]

As the reader progresses into the book’s mid-section, there are ever more scenes rife with despair:

When the only person who understood you wishes you dead,

the smell of an approaching forest fire feels like a footnote.

And

Each morning the dogs found skeletons of burnt songbirds.

Each morning you looked at the vodka bottle under your window.

[The Self-conscious Gorgeousness of Sunsets, p 39]

By section IV, though, we start to see a relationship that has moved past both infatuation and the wounds of rejection into something more… mature? Resigned?

And so, after all that cheeky volcano stuffing,

after all those wannabe Bastille manifestos,

we finally find our shared history in a place

that yields itself to sequels, alternate versions… [Exhibition Match, p 66]

As for the music in Yakovlev’s words, well, it’s simply everywhere. Though the lines I’ve cited to this point don’t seem particularly to be written in form, there are familiar forms here and there – a prose poem, a pantoum, a couple of triolets and a Spenserian sonnet that begins:

I Zen my way through your legato tale

of balding Mensa men you’ve grown to hate.

I nod and clasp your hand but know I’ve failed

to grasp your zeitgeist. Plus it’s getting late. [Bedtime. P 12]

Turn to a page at random, and you will find lines and couplets that cry out to be read aloud:

Tomorrow’s most remarkable phenomenon

will be the titanium texture of honeysuckle. [The Line Between Our Lanes, p 16]

or

I window-watch the ladies on the highway each morning,

driving to their jobs at electrical corporations,

with their revealing dresses and gothic hair, [The Grass Highway, p 48]

What more can I say to tempt you? The poems are full of enchanting imagery and evocative allusions: James Joyce, Monty Python, Nabokov, Saint Kilda’s sheep, Charon and Cerberus, Marconi and Stravinsky. Finally, if you are new to Anton Yakovlev’s poetry, you will find an artist with his feet firmly planted mid-career, but you are still early enough to become a fan before he has ascended to the pantheon of our great writers, known to all, a household name. And if you want to ignore my peroration and discover Yakovlev unaided:

That’s okay, I’d say to myself.

At least you are here. [At the James Joyce House, p 68]

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Unshod Music: A review of Magicicada by Claire Millikin (reviewed by S. Stephanie)

Magicicada by Claire Millikin

Unicorn Press (2024)

Softcover, $18 (103 Pages)

ISBN 978-0-87775-161-8

available from Unicorn Press http://www.unicorn-press.org/

In the cicada, Millikin has found an apt metaphor for the burrowing and burying, the waiting and the bursting out from protective gestation and hibernation into the song all rape, incest, and abuse survivors must sing before they are allowed to transform. Before they are allowed to even begin healing, begin living. That long and repetitive cycle is mimicked justly in these poems. Millikin’s artful use of “Broods” to separate and gather poems of different experience and stages of her childhood echo the cicada’s long 17 years of burial and ascension. But the poems do not rise into some hollow holiness or healing. They do not ask for retribution or acceptance. There are no gods to impart forgiveness here either. They are tough, brutal poems really, and they ask only one thing from the reader and from the poet herself; they ask only for straight up, spoken admission. In fact, they demand it:    

At nautical dusk you can no longer separate

the present from the past,

terrestrial trace. Admit it,

you know exactly what happened.

         (from “Civil, Nautical, Astronomical”)

In their frankness, these poems without emotion, without an ounce of romanticism or sentimentality admit the stark reality of a painful past. In “Field of Vision” Millikin objectively states:

… rape opens your eyes

never to close again.

As if studying her past under a microscope and pinning it to a collection of truths the way we pin insects and butterflies, Millikin, as the better poet, is after more than the personal truth.  She is mapping out a broader one. A truth that fits more than her own body. And she believes in detailed specifics.

For those who were raised by mothers who did not protect their children from husbands who violated them.  Raised by mothers who ignored the truth and punished the child instead of the perpetrator. For those whose silence, anorexia, and truancy was not questioned, but punished instead with more abuse. These poems seek to call and lay out in black and white a broad, more encompassing truth: Details and specifics matter. No one passes ‘go’ unless they can name the poison, name the criminal, and also the weapon that made the wounds. In “Succor” she recalls a trauma that has shaped and directed her life in just such detached, specific detail:

You don’t spend seventy-seven days

in solitary confinement at age fourteen

without the need to say this

is what it was, your fifteenth birthday

in solitary’s

hard human sky.

Where you learned to sing

without a congregation. 

As tough as some of these poems are to read, and though some of them leave us flinching, the poet shapes a subject that could easily be sensationalized or sentimentalized, guides it instead into truths that extend beyond the personal into the political. Sprinkled throughout, some truths expose and bleed into the social culture of the American South where “…enslaved sharecroppers are buried in unjust graves…”, and some extend to violent histories as far away as Indonesia even. All the while, the cicadas rise and sing their unremitting song throughout this book, just as these truths are spoken and repeated until they become their own living rhythm and refrain.   And if there is any criticism to be had here, one might wish for more poems about how the selfish ignoring of pain and the terrible punishing of innocent truth connect, provide a background music to all social crimes and war. But I will not fault such a creative book for that.  I would say the book more than fulfills its goal of acknowledgement and more than pins the truths of a traumatic childhood into a collection.  I would also describe these haunting poems exactly as the poet herself has described the cicadas in one of the final poems called “School Shoes”:

…In the cicada’s last singing…

their burning song without fire,

their weighted notes without heft,

neither stay nor vanish

but become the unshod

school of remembrance.

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HeadLines - Richard Foerster

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“The guests had come to escape troubles . . .” writes Robert Haynes in his timely poem that opens this issue. Indeed, troubles are everywhere around us in this Summer of 2024. Fractured politics, religious strife, demonization of “the others” among us, armed conflicts, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation, corporate greed, Covid and bird flu—on and on ad infinitum. There’s no escaping them this side of a cloister’s walls, and I’d argue not even there. As a writer and editor, however, I have always believed that the Arts, and poetry in particular, by embracing the entire spectrum of humanity—including all our worst instincts and fears—can provide, as Robert Frost said, “a clarification of life” and “a momentary stay against confusion.” Not an escape then, far from it, but a means to cope and perhaps find a way forward.

In an essay from 35 years ago, I wrote that “literary editing is at best a balance between disinterested judgment and an indulgence of personal tastes.” I still hold to that belief. As guest editor for this issue of Hole in the Head Review, I looked for poems that engaged me from beginning to end, that wielded language and form in accomplished ways, that startled, challenged, amused, made me laugh out loud, that even gave me a twinge of jealousy (Gee, I wish I could write like that!)—poems that always left me wanting to share my enthusiasm for them with you, Dear Readers. My thanks to Editor Bill Schulz for allowing me this privilege.

            —Richard Foerster

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