Coming on the heels of her well received The Naked World (2022), Irina Mashinski’s poetry collection Giornata has slipped in virtually unnoticed. Published in November 2022 by Červená Barva Press, this book stands completely on its own. Although it shares some of its table of contents with its sibling — a score of poems appears in both books — Giornata collects work written in Russian and translated to English by the poet’s long-term collaborators, Maria Bloshteyn and Boris Dralyuk. It contextualizes some of the same poems in an entirely different way than the hybrid, more narrative-centered earlier book, where the translated poems act as companions to prose and poetry written originally in English.
The new volume opens with a poem entitled “The Black Eagle (Aquila Verreauxii) At Dawn,” begging the search-engine savvy reader to look up the species and to find herself, unexpectedly, in southern Africa, watching a very large bird take flight: “He mounts — and scans the earthscapes below, / his arid realm, / to the nearest borders / of his self-chosen pale.” The poet notes the uselessness of the common labels that humans — and specifically, colonial ornithologists — have used to describe the bird.
But “Africa” or, say,
His own name, or the one he carries on his
serrated wings
— Verreaux —
he neither knows nor needs.
Maria Bloshteyn, the poet behind the word “pale” in this translation, couldn’t have chosen better. (Bloshteyn translated most of the poems in this collection.) It points to the modern Jewish history and Mashinski’s family’s roots in the pale of settlement within the Russian Empire — a tsarist government’s imposed limit on where Jews could live — and thrusts it against the adjective “self-chosen.” The bird is confined to a habitat that is, however, uniquely suited to his needs. Humans with their labels and borders are unwelcome.
But what of the poet? An immigrant, forced to contend with borders to a greater extent than the bird, she has had to leave her native habitat as defined by geography. This is perhaps a fate that befits a poet — a necessary rite of passage that gives her wings. In “Away from Ocean’s Pull,” she addresses her family name, Mashinski, constructing her own lineage in the poetry that has transcended its culture and place of origin: “You reel her in but she just wiggles off, / no matter if you’re Gilgamesh or Beowulf, / mere fisherman or Orpheus himself.”
In a prose piece included at the end of the book, “The Poet and the Child,” Mashinski traces another sort of roots. “Poets are people who manage to keep alive what they discover in childhood (or who never manage to forget it),” she writes. A poet, then, is unmoored from both time and geography; she is able to traverse both at will. What is it then that anchors the poet to our present, that allows her a connection with her readers?
From Moscow to “the other side of Hudson, / where people don’t live” (“On the Other Side of Hudson”), “Poetry fills up drums canisters garbage cans …” — like an earth worm that consumes refuse and turns it into fertilizer, poetry churns all matter of life into itself:
The future enters his mouth
with the grass, humus,
bits of thin torn roots,
alfalfa clumps
and there
passes through the rings of his hearts
— there my heart turned to wax,
melted within my innards —
everything, everything through the wriggling worm
entering in, exiting out,
without being digested, as it was, as it is,
consumed chaos
(“The Worm and the Cinder”)
Poetry feeds on time and the poet’s lived experiences, without quite being able to digest them and returning them as chaos. In the process, however, the worm-poet allows time to pass through the rings of her hearts — her suffering is likened to the experiences of Jesus on the cross in the quotation from a Biblical psalm. In the scope of this collection, the poet foregrounds grief, assimilating the deaths of her parents and grandparents, and the death of her partner, into poetry. I’m making an assumption here that the numerically titled poems in the central section of the book, titled In Absentia, are dedicated to one and the same person who, in passing, had left behind a bottle of aftershave and “the toothpaste tube, neck twisted, / as if it’s leaning for a chat down from a berth bed” (“Still-life with a Sink, a Glass Shelf and a Window”).
Beyond the intellectual, emotional, and even psychotherapeutic ways of processing grief, Mashinki offers us a physiological one. Like a worm that knows no other way, a poet cannot help herself grieving in words, in poetic lines — even if these words have no further use, cannot become a fertile soil, if experiences cannot be fully digested, but are returned simply as “consumed chaos.”
In the contemporary American reading culture, we often center the experience of grief as having its own innate value. Mashinski’s way of working with grief belongs to a different poetic tradition. This is the Anna Akhmatova school of poetry, “If only you knew from what rubbish / poetry grows” (trans. Judith Hemschemeyer). The attention in this collection is on how specifically poetry might grow from rubbish. Grief is the method that Akhmatova leaves unmentioned — a mystery of her craft. Mashinski, too, mentions grief by name only once.
Grief wrenched out
by the roots
left behind a hollow,
a paleohole
a void,
a passing ant slides down its slope
a passing downpour soaks the humus
and sprouts at once
(“Geomorphology of a Hole”)
Grieving in language, churning the memories of the people and places that one has lost — this is what poet does day by day, as giornata (from the book’s title) describes the amount of paint an artist can apply to the canvas in a single day of work. Given skill at wielding her grief, a poet’s work might sprout a new life.
[Published by Cervena Barva Press on November 6, 2022, 110 pages, $18.009 paperback]
About the Poet: Irina Mashinski was born in Moscow and graduated from the Physical Geography Department of Moscow University where she completed her Ph.D. (Paleogeography and the Theory of Landscape). During Perestroika, she founded “Bullfinch,” a children’s literary studio in Moscow. In 1991, she moved to the US, where she taught high school mathematics as well as history and meteorology at several universities. Her work has been translated into several languages and has appeared in Poetry International, World Literature Today, Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. Irina Mashinski is the recipient of several Russian literary awards and, with Boris Dralyuk, of the First Prize in the 2012 Joseph Brodsky / Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition.