“How magical it is to live!” says Ilya Kaminsky in one of the poems from his prize-winning book Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004). Ilya was a featured reader at the June Hoot (along with Catherine O’Brien). His book opens with this poem: 

Author’s Prayer

 If I speak for the dead, I must leave

this animal of my body,

 I must write the same poem over and over,

for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.

 If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge

of myself, I must live as a blind man

 who runs through rooms without

touching the furniture.

 Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking “What year is it?”

I can dance in my sleep and laugh

 in front of the mirror.

Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

 I will praise your madness, and

in a language not mine, speak

 of music that wakes us, music

in which we move. For whatever I say

 is a kind of petition, and the darkest

days must I praise.

                                        – Ilya Kaminsky

 “Praise” is perhaps the most frequently occurring word in Ilya’s poetry. Despite the dislocation and losses in his own life, he said to an interviewer: “I do not raise my voice in protest against the inevitable. I praise what we do have. Because we have so much!” “I aspire to catch those blessed moments of being.”  

In a radically original, playful style full of surprising jumps, varying rhythms, and astonishing images, he reminds us that “In life we do not know what awaits us in the next moment.”  In the poem “Praise” he writes: “The darkness, a magician, finds quarters/ behind our ears. We don’t know what life is,/ who makes it, the reality is thick/ with longing. We put it up to our lips/ and drink.”

 His aim is to “put life on a page – as much life as I can get there.” And he succeeds. “I want to leave my readers laughing in a poem about death and crying in the poem about weddings.” His wish is to be “a spiritual poet” and “a storyteller” and he is both.
 In “Author’s Prayer” he writes of speaking for the dead, and in longer works, which often combine poetry and prose in a remarkable way, he pays homage to many dead poets – Celan, Brodsky, Montale, Tsvetaeva, Babel, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and others – “whose writings have saved me in one way or another.” He advises those of us who write to “Read everything.”

 “May your writing hand be blessed” is how he often closes letters to other writers.  We as readers and writers are indeed blessed by his presence in our lives through his amazing poetry.

– Harvey Shepard

 “Author’s Prayer” copyright 2004 by Ilya Kaminsky. For more about Ilya’s poetry, life, and beliefs, see the fascinating interviews  at www.ilyakaminsky.com/CrankyInterview.html and adirondackreview.homestead.com/interviewkaminsky.html, and also his website ilyakaminsky.com