But I loved the stubbornness of her bedclothes!
I bite them, taste bedclothes
the sweet mechanism of pillows and covers.


A serious woman, she danced
without a shirt, covering what she could.
We lay together on Yom Kippur, chosen by a wrong God,
the people of a book, broken by a book.

Elegy for Joseph Brodsky


In plain speech, for the sweetness
between the lines is no longer important,
what you call immigration I call suicide.
I am sending, behind, the punctuation,
unfurling nights of New York, avenues
slipping into Cyrillic
winter coils words, throws snow on a wind.
You, in the middle of an unwritten sentence, stop,
exile to a place further than silence.


I left your Russia for good, poems sewn into my pillow
rushing towards my own training
to live with your lines
on a verge of a story set against itself.
To live with your lines, those where sails rise, waves
beat against the city's granite in each vowel,
pages open by themselves, a quiet voice
speaks of suffering, of water.


We come back to where we have committed a crime,
we don't come back to where we loved, you said;
your poems are wolves nourishing us with their milk.
I tried to imitate you for two years. It feels like burning
and singing about burning. I stand
as if someone spat at me.
You would be ashamed of these wooden lines,|
how I don't imagine your death
but it is here, setting my hands on fire.

Joseph Brodsky

Joseph made his living by giving private lessons in everything from engineering to Greek. His eyes were sleepy and small, his face dominated by a huge mustache, like Nietszche's. He mumbled. Do you enjoy Brahms? I cannot hear you, I said. How about Chopin? I cannot hear you. Mozart? Bach? Beethoven? I am hard of hearing, could you repeat that please? You will have great success in music, he said. To meet him, I go back to the Leningrad of 1964. The streets are devilishly cold: we sit on the pavement, he begins abruptly (a dry laugh, a cigarette) to tell me the story of his life, his words changing to icicles as we speak. I read them in the air.

Even without his dedications to these other writers, Kaminsky's sympathy to the persecuted and isolated is clear. Not only is he geographically and culturally displaced, but, as he tells us in the book's title poem, My secret: at the age of four I became deaf. As in the case of his other forms of exile, he describes his disability not in terms of loss, but opportunity and transformationWhen I lost my hearing, I began to see voices. Indeed, his work often features a synthesis of senses bordering on synesthesia. He writes of Tsvetaeva, I imagined her voice smelling of oranges; of the night, [it] undressed us (I counted its pulse); of October, grapes hung like the fists of a girl / gassed in her prayer. In the assonance of undressed uspulse and the consonance of grapesgirl / gassed, and in innumerable half-rhymes throughout the collection, Kaminsky's subtle, fluid, sonic mastery serves to quietly unite all elements of his poems, no matter how disparate.

The fact that he has achieved a style that is simultaneously so sonically dense, imagistically rich, emotionally stirring, socially and historically inventive, and, while following in the footsteps of acknowledged literary legends, still emerging as uniquely his own, and all by the age of twenty seven, is nothing short of astonishing. Dancing in Odessa is a triumphant debut, announcing the arrival of a poet whose talents, and potential, are limitless.