Anatoly Kudryavitsky is an Irish poet living in Dublin and in Reggio di Calabria, Italy. His poems appear in Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The North, The Prague Revue, Plume, BlazeVox, The Honest Ulsterman, Cyphers, Stride, The American Journal of Poetry, etc., and have been anthologised on many occasions. His most recent poetry collections are The Two-Headed Man and the Paper Life (MadHat Press, USA, 2019) and Scultura Involontaria (Multimedia Edizioni, Italy, 2020; a bilingual English/Italian edition of his selected poems). His new collection entitled Sky Sailing is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry (Ireland) in 2022. His latest novel, The Flying Dutchman, has been brought out by Glagoslav Publications, UK, in 2018. In 2020, he won an English PEN Translate Award for his anthology of Russian dissident poetry 1960-1980 entitled Accursed Poets (Smokestack Books, UK, 2020). He is the editor of SurVision poetry magazine.
The sea opened its synonymous eyes, and the morning
sailed in, brimming with Leviathan sounds,
carrying a drowned arithmetic.
How did we end up
in these voices, in the shapes
of paragraphs preparing a solecism lounge
for our aspirations? I don’t understand your
“I don’t understand.”
Loyalty is the polymath
of pain. An inherited flower.
Be a fish on a foam parade, look at me
through the window of promises.
This is the day for reading postcards
of non-being. Books and walls get pregnant
with fire; diggers unearth daggers.
Your glance is full of night.
Aeolia
This sweet-eyed water… The language
of handprints on milestones;
gods, secreted in pebbles,
in syllable bubbles…
Countries grow up in a toyland.
Mountains, up to their knees,
a couple of stray peninsulas…
The matters of being and becoming.
Elisium blossomed here before it digressed
downstream. Meadow eyes saw pastures
of non-imagery and parasitic cities
waiting to be born.
There was a special delivery of weather; the Argonauts
were protecting ergonomics.
You could talk to a wolf to your heart’s content
without having to feed your spleen to him.
Time is a mirror where the past poses
as the future; history, a jellified air.
A moment we live in, a rockery
of thoughts. Rodents. A sundial.
Full-Stop Land
Γειά σου, the city of no return. Your fear
is somebody’s private river, a mountain
trembling with thought. Who is wrapping villages
in the map of Pontus?
In the little coffins of bookshelves, rectangulars
celebrate Apollonius’s theorem.
Hagia Sophia fuses the confused sea.
Destinies joined by a gossip, by gradation…
Here’s the gate of the gateless. The sunset
devours remnants of a sunrise.
Timeshift is “in position.” Time bombs
dream of metal detectors.
The night’s dead weight… Doubts shiver
under the solipsism blanket.
Every martyr is a flower. The land
of gladioluses owns its owners.
Naregno, Elba
You dream across twilight
petals from an error flower
the weakness of the shore
the power of lightning that strays
through time layers
a reason from the reason cave
slick black figures dive into
an orange eye
bespangled? electrified?
the glow-worms of history
have a feast of seeing
Napoleon is this rock’s
pointing finger
he wants to re-star the sky
Previously published in Shot Glass Journal
From “Calabria”
Sirocco, its sandy hair
a swim-dark sky
palm trees and centuries
Sicily rises from the mist
roads unroad
the Cartesian circle has re-emerged
as a black hole
into another infinity
Previously published in Shot Glass Journal
Poetry in this post: © Anatoly Kudryavitsky
Published with the permission of Anatoly Kudryavitsky