Gloria Mindock
Grief Touched the Sky at Night
Glass Lyre Press
Reviewer: David E. Poston
Can poets do anything to thwart the apocalyptic evil of war? The Falangists in Spain believed so; they murdered García Lorca because they considered him as much of a threat with his pen as others with guns. Anna Akhmatova, despite decades of Soviet efforts to coopt or suppress her poetry, never lost faith in the power of art to overcome oppression. Enduring faith requires enduring patience, though. It has been over twenty years since Sam Hamill edited the anthology Poets Against the War, and American pursuit of that war in its various forms took almost two decades to peter out.
Of course, conflicts continue in various horrible iterations in Syria, in Gaza, all around the globe. Almost as soon as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grasped the world’s attention, writers throughout the world—collectively and individually—began to speak out against it. Deaf Republic, Ilya Kaminsky’s 2019 dramatic fable in verse, predates the current full-scale war in Ukraine, but Russian annexations and incursions there began in 2014. More recently, in 2022, came the anthology Sunflowers: Ukrainian Poetry on War, Resistance, Hope and Peace, edited by Kalpna Singh-Chitnis, who also produced a collection of her own poems titled Love Letters to Ukraine from Uyava. Now, in Grief Touched the Sky at Night, Gloria Mindock adds a new contribution to efforts to speak against the suffering caused by war in Ukraine.
It is hardly Mindock’s first effort to speak out or support other writers’ efforts to do so. As editor of Červená Barva Press, she is deeply connected with the international writing community. Her own work—a half-dozen poetry collections, three chapbooks, and a play—has been translated into eleven languages. This collection is dedicated to Svetoslav Nahum, a Bulgarian dissident whose Escape from Crimea was published by Červená Barva in 2021. Her poem “Numb,” included here, appeared in the Sunflowers anthology. In it, Mindock writes
The landscape is caught in the language
of the enemy.
Nothing seems real.
A bewildered population picks up
guns, praying for some magic to happen.
Is this a dream?
Pain numbed by gunfire—
a crucifixion of bullets.
“Numb” is from the first section, titled “Decomposition.” The opening poem of the section, “First Day of War,” establishes the tenor of the collection:
I ran down twenty-one flights of stairs
to find myself
sitting under a tree
branches sheltering me from grief
The wind blowing it somewhere …
Here we find a first-person narrator caught in the rapid immediacy of action, trees offering shelter, and grief and wind as tangible agents, though their agency will prove uncertain.
Mindock makes a number of good choices here. She lets most of these poems be told by speakers caught up in the war. The language is disarmingly simple and straightforward, the style unobtrusive. Yet there is subtle power in the way metaphors predominate and in the drumroll of mostly one-word titles. Similes are rare, direct concrete images are common. Grief, death, and pain are entities as real as missiles and rubble. The tone may strike a reader as maudlin, but its cumulative effect is to underscore the unaffected, unmitigated horrors the speakers, sometimes children, try to endure and describe.
A series of four poems from that section—“Blue Skies and Sunflowers,” “Boots,” “Bucha,” and “Bullseye”—present the pervasive imagery. The first of the four begins simply, “Watching a country crumble hurts.” It describes sunflowers drenched in blood and continues, “In one town, the crows fly down and / kiss the bodies.” The lines from which the collection’s title is taken personify grief as touching “the black sky at night, / the blue at daylight.” The repetition in “Boots” sounds less naïve when read as a self-directed invocation, a mantra for survival. In contrast, “Bucha” is an anthem of defiance addressed to the world:
Standing with Ukraine
The colors of your flag raised
Blend in with the sky
Sunflowers wilted
But soon will bloom
As evil is defeated
“Bullseye” describes a more plaintive defiance with that same, now-iconic symbol: “Yellow sunflowers / blow in the dust.”
The section ends with two poems directed at Vladimir Putin. The latter, titled “You,” hurls imprecations, while the former, “Putin,” is more naively surreal, describing Putin and his cronies sitting in a golden room, “In chairs so soft, / they drown in the cushions.”
The middle section, “Before War,” moves swiftly from the dreamlike fragile thankfulness of the opening poem to the reality of war described in “Rain.” The calm and fecund scene described in its opening stanza explodes with the horrors of war:
It was yesterday, darkness was seen.
Flames from missiles striking so many buildings.
Neighbors crying for help.
The poem ends with a note of defiance, but also with a stoic emptiness unfathomable to those who have not experienced war firsthand:
When the night is back to normal, I will
be back to a home I love, with a voice
defying all the loss, a depth bearing no end,
a void interconnected with death.
The last section, “Anesthesia,” contains a series of three poems that embody the whole collection. First is “Sometimes”:
Imagine everything drifting into space—
people and objects not mattering anymore.
A stampede of floating humans surrounded by junk.
Sometimes I like to forget all wars.
Maybe someday they will stop.
There will be no buttons to push,
no nuclear missiles to end the earth.
Maybe someday I will smile again and the warm
air will be just warm, no fire to burn us to ash.
The questions in “Carrying” may seem childish, yet we have no answers that do not raise deeper questions about human nature. “Peace” is an excellent example of the subtle work that these brief titles accomplish, its irony starkly revealed in the body of the poem, which begins
The dead have gray skin.
Ashes fall on them today.
Church bells ring dreamily as the survivors weep.
For all the innovative brilliance of its central dramatic conceit, Deaf Republic shares that same deceptively simple language and some of the same metaphors and images found in Grief Touched the Sky at Night: sunlight and silence and a wind with a bicycle between its legs. “Now each of us is / a witness stand,” writes Kaminsky, who concludes his collection with a poem set in this country, ironically titled “In a Time of Peace.” In this country, Gloria Mindock works in the calm safety of Somerville, Massachusetts, and I sit on my patio in North Carolina. In “Another Day in War,” however, Mindock concludes with
Yesterday, I took the hand of my Ukrainian friend and
Russian friend, we danced for the stars
to light the way …
Stanley Kunitz famously said that words get tired, an observation especially apt in light of how words are pervasively abused and debased in our current political climate. As Ella Yevtushenko asks in “#Bucha Massacre,” “What can those words do anyway / against brute force?”
What Gloria Mindock does in this collection is to put readers into the unfathomable, to present the incomprehensible in unadorned, yet immensely powerful language.
