#294.  DEAF REPUBLIC, BY ILYA KAMINSKY.   I read Ilya Kaminsky’s book-length parable-poem Deaf Republic in a single sitting; by the end of it, I was trembling and my hands were shaking.  The setting is an occupied European town; in the opeing scene the citizens have gathered to see and listen to a puppet show.  A soldier attempts to disperse the crowd; he accosts a deaf child, Petya, who spits on him and is shot for his insolence. In that moment—a stanzaic break—a strange transformation takes place:  “The sound we do not hear lifts the gulls off the water.”  The entire population of the town has been rendered deaf. From then on, this separation of townspeople from occupying soldiers is complete—“In these avenues, deafness is our only barricade.”—except for the acts of violence, retribution and resistance that are the conditions of every war.  And from then on and throughout the poem, we wonder: who is the more isolated by their deafness, the townspeople or the soldiers?  

        Kaminsky focuses his narrative on Alfonso and Sonya, the puppeteers—puppets become a constant strange presence in the tale, standing in for those who have been disappeared. The verses given to their marriage are intimate, erotic and joyous; Sonya gives birth to their child.  Around them the townspeople act as their baffled and frightened chorus.  Later in the action we meet the raucous Momma Galya, defiant owner of the puppet theatre, whose female troupe put their puppet strings to vengeful uses.  This the bare skeleton of the plot, which nonetheless caught me up with its inexorable suspense the way we hope for when reading a thriller.  This conveys nothing of the poetic brilliance of the telling, which is both spare and sensual, the arresting beauty of the lines serving, not slowing, the swiftness of the tale.  Few books I know of convey the horrors of occupation—becoming more familiar to us in our own America—and yet, as poetry must, tells them slant.  Deaf Republic has something in it of the lyric strangeness of Bashevis Singer or Marquez, where the realism hovers a few magical feet off the ground.  Li Young Lee has written of it, “This gorgeous long poem is aggrieved, inconsolable, and yet ecstatic, comic, and indefatigably in love with the world.”   Deaf Republic has moved me as no book has done for a good while, perhaps since Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet tore my heart and buoyed me up.  A friend, casting around for how to express how Hamnet had moved her, wrote me: “This is why we have art.”  Reading the black and golden beauties of Deaf Republic, that phrase came back to me, and I want to risk using it now:  this is why we have art.