Transforming the Past
A Review of Kinship by Maxim D. Shrayer
by John Morris
Themes of exile and displacement are central to [Shrayer’s] artistic concerns. These themes give Kinship a depth of feeling and perception that is welcome in contemporary poetry.
40 pp., paperback, $22.99
April 2024
Finishing Line Press
ISBN: 979-8-88838-451-0
Maxim D. Shrayer, a frequent contributor to Vita Poetica, has published outstanding poetry, memoirs, and essays for more than three decades. His latest collection, Kinship, makes a wonderful introduction to his poetic world.
Shrayer was born in Moscow to a Jewish-Russian family with Ukrainian and Lithuanian roots. His family emigrated to the U.S. in 1987, when Shrayer was 20. Like one of his literary heroes, Vladimir Nabokov, Shrayer has developed a supple, expert English voice while continuing to publish in Russian as well. Unsurprisingly, themes of exile and displacement are central to his artistic concerns. So is his experience as a Jew whose ancestors were devout Jews and whose family endured the refuseniks’ limbo for many years.
These themes give Kinship a depth of feeling and perception that is welcome in contemporary poetry. Part of Shrayer’s poetic technique, in many of the poems here, is to wed these wrenching emotions to a semi-formal verse style, as if to create a container for the turbulence. One example, from “Valse Triste,” gives a good sense of this approach:
The park is like a hospital; with masks on
the people’s faces hide their contagion,
yet every walker in the park could be an agent
of the mysterious, virulent invasion.
This description of a stroll in a park on “just another day of post-pandemic” places images of danger and vulnerability within an almost carefree series of near-rhymes. Similarly, in “Bats at Sunset,” the poet observes the animals as they fly “so low that I could see their faces. . . . One bat resembled mother’s Auntie Roza” while
Another had the likeness of Auntie Manya,
my father’s aunt who lived and died in Minsk.
She loved extensive stays in Moscow clinics
and never missed a single day of Pravda.At sunset bats are ugly, soft, and fast –
like old snapshots of the Soviet past.
This virtuosity with formal techniques, blended with grave and poignant topics -- often with a dash of savage irony -- is at times reminiscent of Frederick Seidel’s poems, but Shrayer’s voice is his own.
Reflections on Jewish family and identity give Kinship some of its strongest moments. The sequence called “Eretz Yisrael” offers glimpses of beauty and disaster, ranging over Russia, Israel, and Massachusetts for its images. In one of the poems, the poet wakes up in a traveler’s inn in Jerusalem, “like a babe in her mother’s lap,” and sees, sleeping beside him,
your own – G-d’s – creation,
an eight-year-old daughter.
And all the metaphors mix
on the palette of Saturday morning.
It is, indeed, a mixture of family, faith, and place which Shrayer repeatedly returns to in these poems.
Shrayer, in addition to his poetic accomplishments, is an illustrious “Nabokovian,” having published several works on his fellow Russian émigré, including the classic The World of Nabokov’s Stories. “Homecoming,” the final, and longest, poem in Kinship, imagines the elderly novelist traveling backwards in time from his final home in Switzerland to revisit the settings that were home to his muse over the years:
Here they lived in three different houses, each populated by ghosts.
In that Tudor a wistful nymphet filled his pages with tainted love.
Down the street there’s a cottage. Pale fire illumines its ceilings.
But it is his beloved Russia, which “the Composer” has vowed never to revisit as long as the Soviet state is in power, which finally draws him at the poem’s conclusion:
He’s in Russia not to cry but to wrest from the cannibals’ hands
What is left of his body. . .Only words will follow him, leaving behind empty pages
To the city of the plague which was once the Composer’s home.
So to Montreux, and to death, he returns, his legacy of words imperishable. With this affecting vision of his predecessor’s journey, Shrayer shows us how the past forms us, yet can be surmounted, transformed. The Composer’s “homecoming” is also a moment of passage from mortality to – perhaps, with luck – eternity. Thanks to Maxim D. Shrayer’s compelling, compassionate voice, Kinship is filled with such poetic insights into the ways we navigate this passage.
You can read Maxim D. Shrayer's new poem, “The Conductor from Zion Square,” in our current Autumn 2024 issue.
John Morris is co-editor of Vita Poetica.
