The Inescapable Nightmare: Gods of Unfinished Business by Nina Kossman

A similar sad thread runs through Kossman’s re-creations of Greek myth. Most are succinct, often ironic meditations on the same conflicted figures that drew the 2oth-century Modernist poets: Ariadne. Leda, Daphne, Cassandra, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Alcestis, and more. All trapped in their own myths. But anachronistically interjected among them, she has some “Words for Danton” who “If you hadn’t learned how to write the word ‘execution”/ before you learned how to write the word “pardon”/my friend Danton…” But of course, this is why “you are a revolutionary”. (Who famously ended up under the guillotine blade himself.)

In the book’s second section, Kossman takes us to another failed “revolutionary,” the Galileo precursor Giordano Bruno, burnt upside down at the stake. Even as the Inquisition’s pyre is ignited, he composes a vindicating apologia in his head, insisting that, indeed, the earth revolves around the sun. His ashes are collected in a sack and emptied into the Tiber.

That brutal execution is followed by “One by One”; a poem narrated in the collective voice of the ordinary Ukrainian Jews, lying “like sardines” in the bottom of the Babi Yar pit alongside their children. They’re shot “one by one,” and those holding infants “two by two” with  bullet-economizing single shots. The ghosts buried in their mass grave watch their assailants as they “succumb to senility” and “one by one” enter the ground in “gilded coffins” surrounded by their mourning families.  

One by one
our bones come to meet you – 
it’s an open house day,
we meet and greet new guests;
you don’t recognize us
but no matter
we watch you
from the bottom of our pit,
as you lie awake
clumps of earth in your empty eye sockets
remember
how easy it was
how much fun you had;
pif-paf, pif-paf! 

It’s worth noting that Babi Yar isn’t identified in the title or poem. Nina Kossman came to America with her family as a young girl from the Soviet Union. She’s a long-time New Yorker but continues to publish poetry in Russian as well as English. This is one of several poems in the selection that feels like it may have been originally composed in Russian. Even beyond its ending “pif-paf”, (Russian for “bang-bang”), it speaks to us in a Russian voice. By not naming the event (which would probably be instantly recognized by any Russian reader) the scene becomes reborn, as it were, awakened from its historical nook. 

Later in the book, she has another poem actually titled “Babi Yar”. A bitterly sardonic piece about a family getting ready for a walk in the forest because “the Krauts are knocking on the door again.” That poem is preceded by one titled “Upon Seeing a Portrait of Genrikh Yagoda on a Wall in a Moscow Police Station”. For current generation readers, Kossman does footnote Yagoda as the Stalin era NKVD Director who supervised “arrests, show trials and executions of countless innocent people”. What she doesn’t mention is that this widely publicized police station scene is that of Alexei Navalny’s arraignment, before being taken into custody, never to be released. The poem recites a litany of NKVD victims reaching down through generations like a genetic disease.

…so many inheritors of what can’t be described
so many grandchildren of victims
so many grandchildren of perpetrators
that even the memory of whose grandfather
was a victim, and whose a perpetrator
has been lost.

Are these poems all gloom? Surprisingly not. Like all good poetry, the very act of their being written releases a certain unnamed hope. As does the book’s final lyric sequence with short poems like these.

Perched Between Pities

kiss their hands
soiled with dogwood
veined like a leaf.
Kiss faces of kinship
of the earth-and the heart
flowing sleep-swift,
to the shy, the sad ones
whose eyes no other eyes
seek; whose words
freeze in the unheeding air.
Go to them; see:
neck deep in pity
your awed self, sealed. 

How Slowly the Seagulls Circle.

See how slowly the seagulls circle
their wings flapping sleepily
over the red clay by the lake,
the same clay from which the Greeks
molded their narrow vases
with patterns from the lives of the gods
(those who own the secret of death,
turned out to be subject to it) –
gods made from red clay
at the lake of sleepily circling birds.

To further stretch my already-stretched opening metaphor: Stephen Dedalus’ mythic namesake finally did escape his impossible maze. Tragically so, because myth is tragic. But he soared, if ultimately alone, into the freedom of the open air.