Shearsman 62: John Couth reviews Katia Kapovich

Shearsman 62

John Couth

reviews Katia Kapovich

Katia Kapovich: Gogol in Rome
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2004. 112pp, pb, £8.99 / $14.99).

This is an enjoyable collection, full of freshness and insight, based largely on Kapovich's experience of growing up in the pre-Glasnov Soviet Union. She summons skills vividly to evoke person and situation and to firmly locate each event she is describing within its cultural/historical moment - her little but not insignificant dramas are enacted on a much larger stage. Reading this collection, it is often like dipping in to someone's private diary of reminiscences in which you become strongly aware of the poet as fragile but resilient. Yet her writing resonates of the Russian literary tradition she has inherited, as the book's title suggests.

She handles the narratives of her poems with a poet's consciousness and economy, and with a deft sense of storytelling. Her episodes pass before the mind's eye with the vividness of a home movie shot by Chekhov, but with the plaintiff, lingering appeal of Dostoevsky or Pasternak:

The obese woman who used to wake up
our whole house by starting her Subaru at 6 a.m.
has committed suicide. Snow
hangs like a set of unlaundered sheets
in the windows. When I walked into
her seventh floor studio, the standard lamp
was still on, but could only light itself,
refusing to interfere with the dull dusk
of the interior the police had already searched.

('Apartment 75')

Her evocation of place is precise and succinct, just enough detailed mise-en-scène for the functioning of the narrative and an atmosphere constructed:

Located in a large crimson villa
built by the Dutch architect Bernardadsey
in the New Tradition style,
the place was surrounded by a handsome
wrought iron grille
and guarded from within by a Soviet militia woman.
The villa faced the city prison on the other side of the plaza.
A square "park area," scantily planted with trees,
lay in between. In winter the park
became translucent, black and white.

('Forbidden Fellini')

Equally emotionally precise is her description of person; her observations are always assured and particular. As is evident in these opening lines, where we encounter girl who was once a part of her life and whose importance for the poet clearly exists within the frame of the poem and beyond:

A pale long face, half shaded with dark lashes,
her eyes always looking down,
she seemed like a nun in her Soviet brown
school uniform. Throughout her school years
she was drawing on her sketch pad
under the desk while I did my best
to distract the teachers from her.
Nevertheless, they were often offended
by her "almost physical absence"
during Math, Physics, History
and all the other classes,
except Biology. The study of human anatomy
claimed Tanya's attention.

('Tanya')

She also shines in the way she balances objective detail with her presentation of personal experience, as in the final stanza of 'Painting A Room' with excitement conveyed by the short almost breathless sentences:

Then I wash the brushes and turn off the light.
This is my last night before moving abroad.
I lie down on the floor, a rolled-up coat
under my head. This is the last night.
Freedom smells of a freshly painted room,
of wooden floors swept with a willow broom,
and of stale raisin bread.

We see this balance at the end of 'At the Young Pioneer Camp' where, once again, her use of simple rhymes and uncomplicated vocabulary point at a simple truth behind the complexity of her emotion:

An iron frame, a mattress with bad springs,
A clock above my head without one hand …
I opened my journal and wrote "childhood stinks"
And closed my eyes. They were full of sand.

After leaving Russia (via Israel) to settle in the US, Kapovich's poems seem less certain and reveal to us a woman more hardened by experience, less idealistic, less oppositional. Always an outsider, she has settled in a culture which is more chaotic and not so easily defined in simple human terms. For me her poems are not so vulnerably personal, and just a little 'cleverer'. When she leaves her Russian-ness behind her poems lose some of their vividness and dramatic detail — but this is only a generalised gripe because 'Veronica's Secret Life' is wonderful, as is the angst ridden 'The Rat', and 'Twelve Sheep' from her Israeli experience.

She excels as a poet of the final era of the Soviet Union articulating its oppressions, pettiness and stupidities against the growth of a girl to womanhood, and her assertion of the importance of simple human values. She is never permanent; she is timid and assertive, compliant and dissident, but represents throughout the survival of the fertile human conscience in the face of sterile political practicality.