Books in Review
region, Ukraine. The region was torn,
invaded, and occupied by various nations
for centuries; hence its rich history. The
Bukovyna region is now a part of an
independent Ukraine, scattered on the
luscious slopes of the eastern Carpathian
Mountains—a beautiful country deeply
rooted in tradition, religion, and folklore.
Matios’s novel Sweet Darusya, initially
published in Ukraine in 2003, has been
read, studied, researched, and written about
worldwide—mostly in academic circles. The
question remains, however, why it took over a
decade for its English translation to appear.
In my opinion, not only the complexity of
the text made it a daunting task for a skilled
translator to undertake but also the chal-
lenge of communicating in another lan-
guage a deeply seeded trauma of Ukraine
and its people, masterfully portrayed by
Matios.
A team of translators, Michael M.
Naydan and Olha Tytarenko, undertook
this momentous project, as each of them
brought their own expertise to the table
and turned it into a successful collaboration
by blending translation styles and makingspecific translation choices that work best
for the English-speaking reader.
I read Sweet Darusya multiple times:
when it was first published in Ukraine, then
a few years later, and most recently in its
English translation. It is a powerful text on
many levels: individual, familial, communal,
societal, and national. It is a true family saga
without a clearly outlined plot, showcasing
a few storylines that overlap and tell a story
through their own characters and events. At
times, it feels that the novel develops on its
own without a writer behind it.DORIANNE LAUXDorianne Laux
Only as the Day Is Long:
New and Selected Poems
New York. W. W. Norton. 2019. 128 pages.
This newest collection by Dorianne Laux
includes selections from her five previous
books of poetry and thirty-two pages of new
poetry, some of her best to date. As with
any collection of selected poems spanning
twenty-nine years, we are able to see more
clearly (by way of the close juxtaposition of
poems separated by decades) constants and
metamorphoses in poetic style and content.
Laux’s work from the beginning has
excelled by way of voice and imagery: a
distinct and consistent voice from book to
book delights with imagery that is vibrant,
original, and vivid. These qualities of imag-
ery shine in every poem, but nowhere
more so than in her portraits, especially
of celebrities that all of us can picture,
such as Mick Jagger and Cher. We have
the instant recognition of aptness that we
experience, for example, in reading Rilke’s
“Spanish Dancer.” Another constant is her
recurrent subject matter: we find ourselves
mostly preoccupied with sex, loss, death,
and love—to wit, mostly universal human
concerns considered through the lens of a
particular experience related in a confes-
sional style strongly influenced by Anne
Sexton and Sharon Olds. This influence
is most strongly noticed in poems about
domestic violence, abuse, and sexual exulta-
tion. (As a side note, I might wonder if from
some vantage point in the future our own
time might seem oddly obsessed with sexual
matters when two thousand preceding years
of canonical poetry mostly doesn’t include it
or does so discreetly.)
Laux’s poetry, then, is decidedly written
in the grain of her poetic era, not acrossthat grain. As such, we can sometimes feel
as if we’ve read these poems before in some
way: their strategies often fall within a kind
of group free-verse style that almost always
feels vaguely familiar by way of strategy and
movement, the kind of consensus style we
might surmise frequently in the high-profile
glossy magazines of our time. There’s also a
treatment of the line and rhythm that has
too often been the group-style default set-
ting of contemporary free verse for the last
few decades—i.e., rhythms that are mostly
prose rhythms and lines that are mostly
determined by syntactical sense and visual
approximation than by time and measured
syllabic configurations (or even any other
determination, for that matter).
In these ways, then, Laux’s poetry does
not distinguish itself, except in those poems
that rise above everything else she has writ-
ten and astonish us with their achievement
even within this received style. Such poems
exist in this collection, enough to warrant a
careful reading and maybe enough for her
to emerge when all is done as one of the best
in her group, the way a specific painter may
have emerged as one of the best “Impres-
sionists.” It’s too early to say, but I would
urge readers not to miss two poems in par-
ticular, though there are others. First, “Anti-
lamentations,” in her penultimate book, The
Book of Men, begins by telling us to “regret92 W LT SUMMER 2019