Octopus Books, 2006
Reviewed by Jessica Bozek
The central question of Genya Turovskaya’s new chapbook, The Tides--one in a series of eight recently published by Octopus Books--seems to be how “to begin what has begun again” in an “inarticulate / empire approximating cataclysm,” a landscape whose “first sky thickens” and “second / sky upends / the roots of trees.” Turovskaya’s figures have come unmoored, are upside-down and incomplete like the man on the book’s cover.
“Pax,” the first of the book’s three sections or longish poems, strikingly declares,
everything else is a lie
but for this I would lie down
Immediately, the poem sets up an ambiguous opposition: “this” must refer to the peace of the title and suggest that “everything else” that the speaker currently knows and experiences is in some way false. There is further shiftiness in the denotative and syntactical mutations of “lie.” It is fitting that such opposition occurs early, since it will function as both theme and mode throughout the book. The first page of The Tides does something else: it shows us Turovskaya’s careful attention to lineation and spacing, to the enactment of the poem on the page with little interference from punctuation:
as the arc
after
(ruin) (rain)
Here, the arrow we might draw to connect the vowel shift in the parentheticals serves as a kind of bridge, the celebratory rainbow that “arc” suggests but that the poem will be unable to provide. Still, such linguistic permutation recurs in The Tides and offers a point from which to “begin again.”
The speaker of “Pax” dreams her addressee “is broken”: “I feed / and bathe you like a child.” As in Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005), The Tides presents the domestic personal as both confirmation and means of perseverance. But Turovskaya’s vision of what to do in the face of local and international disaster is subtler. Here is Spahr:
It makes me angry that how we live in our bed—full of connected loving and full of isolated sleep and dreaming also—has no relevance to the rest of the world.
How can the power of our combination of intimacy and isolation have so little power outside the space of our bed?
And here is Turovskaya:
what other reason is there to persist
it brighten and it fades
the world outside
this house
Where Spahr posits her poem as “an attempt to speak with the calmness of the world seen from space and to forget the details,” Turovskaya refuses to forget and eschews removal from the traumatized world; she takes us into the space of catastrophe and finds a way to exist within it. In the ebb and flow of destruction and creation, her methods include caring, birthing, and poem-making. What seems most significant, though, is that her figures respond, in one way or five ways:
do you approach
recede
the battering tide
Both urgency and an ambivalence toward the things men do build in “Pax”; the speaker is alone, “splayed / in ambiguous intimacy / with myself,” until
suddenly men appear and absolutely nothing
happens
except that something is and becomes was
The men’s heroics—“in fireproof suits,” “running toward the pier,” “afloat,” “hoisting the flags and dancing on the moon”—amount to little more than accoutrement and cannot change the speaker’s sense that “something is happening to me.”
As an example of Turovskaya’s exquisite use of the page, the horror of a sudden blank is one she lets readers experience for themselves as they round a line:
something has interrupted
something else someone
turns to look
over their shoulder
there is nothing there
begin again
begin with nothing with the man falling the man flung
upward
begin with the knees
The cover of The Tides amplifies our building sense that the particular tragedy here presented is the collapse of the World Trade Center and its accompanying spectacle of rubbed out skyline, tumbling bodies, and powerless rescue workers. We see a suited man, upside-down from shoes to shins, against an intense blue sky. Turovskaya undoes trauma in a method not unlike Kurt Vonnegut’s in Slaughterhouse Five. Billy Pilgrim sees war films backwards before he sees them forwards and is thus able to reverse the damage done by bombs:
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating day and night, dismantling cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals…. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
Turovskaya’s speaker has not, however, “come unstuck in time” and can accept the irrevocability of “these hours this hour.” She respects the dignity of the falling man by not showing us his face, by resolving to “not repeat” the scene and turning her gaze instead to “this peculiar hour / this aluminum harbor.” “Pax” concludes with this stunning image and creates a segue into the stillness and stability suggested by the title of the book’s second section, “Anchorage.”
The anchorage Turovskaya presents is not a rooting, but instead a restless searching, a “dragging over portals, portages.” She suggests that there is no balance, no “perfect quiet,” no
… un-fluxed topos
no ur no protean cell
but the crux
in counterpulse
in xxx
In the wintry post-apocalyptic space of The Tides extreme action can serve to “destabiliz[e] the air” and upset the status quo, which leads to the trauma presented in “Pax.” In this world salvation is an ambiguous return, hard-won after “it came slowly / that pain doesn’t hurt,” and, finally, is located in survival, in the refugee’s beginning again:
but the white swells of the mind
remained as harbor lights of temporary cities
we made it out of the fog
a figure
swimming to shore with a bag
of winter oranges
lights tinkled around its body
and its eyes
The resistance to anchorage in any conventional sense is emphasized by the provisional quality of this figure’s freight. Why the figure carries what it does is of little consequence—Turovskaya simply presents a personal commitment, without comment. Furthermore, as if to highlight the potentially problematic nature of attachment, even language is tenuous: “the floating filament of temporary / vowels.”
The book’s eponymous third section moves away from blighted cityscape and sea to a muddy village. Here, too, the rough-hewn provides a model for persistence:
relentless dust
rope bridge
over the primitive landscape
we could start with
we could live with
What Turovskaya ends up with is reverberation enough to begin again: “your voice lagging / in the din of the underpass,” “the cicadas stirring in the trees,” “radiance / its sounds in the causeways.” Such resonance just might suffice to help these figures reconstruct what has been “erased”:
the hands … from the clock
the clock from the wall
the wall from the house
the house from the field
the field from the landscape
in the transient fact of dusk
The Tides etches metal pictures in the murk, lets resound what is no longer:
the Chinese
string instruments
whose names were just
as beautiful
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Genya Turovskaya was born in Kiev, Ukraine and grew up in New York City. Her poetry and translations from Russian have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, 6x6, Aufgabe, Poets and Poems, Octopus, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn where she edits the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse.
**
Jessica Bozek just received her MFA from the University of Georgia and has poems in the newest issues of Apocryphal Text, Columbia Poetry Review, Dusie, GlitterPony, and Gulf Coast. This summer she is in Massachusetts watching the sailboats pass.
