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God of Missed Connections

by Elizabeth Bachinsky

In the press material that accompanies Elizabeth Bachinsky’s third poetry collection, Bachinsky expresses her desire to “capture the sense of what it feels like to not know where you’re from, to be looking for connections, and to come up with ghosts.” Her collection is an investigation into her Ukrainian heritage, and driven by both personal experience and historical research.

Ukraine’s troubled history is at the centre of this book. The explosion of nuclear reactor number four at the infamous Chernobyl plant infuses Bachinsky’s poems with its destructive, future-eradicating energies. In “God of Mechanical Accidents,” a chilling sonnet inspired by a photo essay about Chernobyl, a child at the Children’s Cancer Hospital in Minsk “is two-headed, tow-headed, mythic, cries/ for milk with one mouth, succor with the other.” This grotesque “young/ Janus, looking forward, looking back,” stands not only for the generation afflicted by the fallout of the Chernobyl disaster, but also for Bachinsky’s own sense of displacement in relation to her Ukrainian heritage.

The latter subject is less subtly approached in “The Wax Ceremony,” a long poem in which Bachinsky splices incantations from a book on Ukrainian-Albertan folk history with the immigrant experience of one Michael Bazynski, as well as her own musings on the process of memory and art. “In my family, we don’t speak of family./ And we don’t speak of the past.// What is there to know? I’m not afraid to ask,” she writes. She isn’t afraid of either the questions or the answers, but she does seem unwilling to push the poem’s form beyond textual collage, where self-conscious commentary on process usurps technique: “She can’t begin to write/ about this”; and later, “She can’t begin to write. What then?”

The piece, which runs some 20 pages, seems more like notes toward an eventual poem than the poem itself. Pity that it should form such a significant portion of the book. Many of the other poems here are enviably good.

 

Reviewer: Mark Callanan

Publisher: Nightwood Editions

DETAILS

Price: $17.95

Page Count: 88 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-0-88971-226-3

Released: April

Issue Date: 2009-6

Categories: Poetry