ISBN: 978-1-915108-08-1
Date of Publication: 24 January 2023
Your struggle will become the best thing about you.
Only your mind will be able to decipher your thoughts, like
needing scissors to open a pack of scissors.
(from ‘Fortune Poem’)
“KAYAKÖY offers us a fascinating guide to life’s sweet and sour, to tragedy and what grounds we have for hope. Moments in a child’s life – collecting minnows, blowing dandelions – are preternaturally lit, yet suffused in retrospect with a longing for grace. Innocence is exchanged for adulthood – but for Onitskansky, the breaking down of ice in a thaw is also the gift of freedom for what has long languished beneath. These poems explore nothing less than the life-process, powerfully played out here in the sudden death of a father and the wounding of marital break-up. From it all, the poet emerges strongly as both ‘ponderer’ and ‘wonderer’ (‘Delver’s Dirt’).”
—Martyn Crucefix
“These poems have enviable life force. Energized to their core – in language, syntax and image – they celebrate the ‘merry bedlam’ of our creaturely planet, and the beauty and oddity of being alive.”
—Kathryn Maris
*
Bird’s Nest in Beech
The bird’s nest sits high where the mind should be
but its heavy disorder suggests feeling.
So it seems a heart in the place of thought,
which is not unfamiliar among things suffered,
such as your absence on this 99th day.
Perhaps a shared desertion returns me to the place
where my lovely mop is stuck in a tree –
one ramshackle nest that has served and been done with?
I see an ordinary womb, or woman, resting there,
who is held as my endurance is held,
gently yet securely by a kind of reaching.
This is not a purely heroic reaching. No, it’s not just that.
It is a helpless tangle in branches growing
to the same cold light that braces these fields –
sheer weight, glittering as if wept upon,
where the skies stretching to you have nearly torn,
clouds dispersing like a thousand feathers.
