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Music for the Dead and Resurrected: Poems
WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL GRIFFIN PRIZE
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST POETRY BOOKS OF 2020 BY The New York Times
In her book of letters to the dead, the prize-winning poet Valzhyna Mort relearns how to mourn those erased by violent history.
With shocking, unforgettable lyric force, Valzhyna Mort’s Music for the Dead and Resurrected confronts the legacy of violent death in one family in Belarus. In these letters to the dead, the poet How do we mourn after a century of propaganda? Can private stories challenge the collective power of Soviet and American historical mythology?
Mort traces a route of devastation from the Chernobyl fallout and a school system controlled by ideology to the Soviet labor camps and the massacres of World War II. While musical form serves as a safe house for the poet’s voice, old trees speak to her as the only remaining witnesses, hosts to both radiation and memory.
Valzhyna Mort, born in Belarus and now living in the United States, conjures a searing, hallucinogenic ritual of rhythmic remembrance in a world where appeals to virtue and justice have irrevocably failed.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST POETRY BOOKS OF 2020 BY The New York Times
In her book of letters to the dead, the prize-winning poet Valzhyna Mort relearns how to mourn those erased by violent history.
With shocking, unforgettable lyric force, Valzhyna Mort’s Music for the Dead and Resurrected confronts the legacy of violent death in one family in Belarus. In these letters to the dead, the poet How do we mourn after a century of propaganda? Can private stories challenge the collective power of Soviet and American historical mythology?
Mort traces a route of devastation from the Chernobyl fallout and a school system controlled by ideology to the Soviet labor camps and the massacres of World War II. While musical form serves as a safe house for the poet’s voice, old trees speak to her as the only remaining witnesses, hosts to both radiation and memory.
Valzhyna Mort, born in Belarus and now living in the United States, conjures a searing, hallucinogenic ritual of rhythmic remembrance in a world where appeals to virtue and justice have irrevocably failed.
112 pages, Hardcover
First published November 3, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 57 reviews
November 22, 2020
Valzhyna Mort is a Belarusian poet who now lives in the United States. These poems deal largely with the ghosts of after - war, disaster, occupation - and ask what should be spoken of and how we can deal with our memories.
Bus Stops: Ars Poetica
Little Songs
"...But under that roof, folded
like dead man's hands over the house,
we still live..."
If you've read A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, something about the tone felt very similar to me, the way the people living in the village are also living alongside the dead.
Bus Stops: Ars Poetica
Little Songs
"...But under that roof, folded
like dead man's hands over the house,
we still live..."
If you've read A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, something about the tone felt very similar to me, the way the people living in the village are also living alongside the dead.
September 29, 2020
"Genesis"
I've always preferred Cain.
His angry
loneliness, his
lack of mother's
love, his Christian
sarcasm: 'Am I
my brother's keeper?'
asks his brother's murderer.
Aren't we indeed the keepers of our dead?
Let me start again:
I prefer apples that roll
far from the tree.
Dry like a twig
is umbilical cord, tucked between legs.
How did they cut it, Cain? With
a stone?
Under Criminal Record
write, "Mother, home."
Under Weapon
write, "Mother, home."
I've always preferred Cain.
His angry
loneliness, his
lack of mother's
love, his Christian
sarcasm: 'Am I
my brother's keeper?'
asks his brother's murderer.
Aren't we indeed the keepers of our dead?
Let me start again:
I prefer apples that roll
far from the tree.
Dry like a twig
is umbilical cord, tucked between legs.
How did they cut it, Cain? With
a stone?
Under Criminal Record
write, "Mother, home."
Under Weapon
write, "Mother, home."
October 7, 2020
Have I told you about how much I live inside your stories and not reality?
This was a powerful and intricate collection of poems that wanders primarily through the twentieth century, reflecting on a tumultuous period in Belarus. What was most striking about these poems was Mort’s subjects. They were intimate stories from her family, historical events, literature and, most notably, music.
What I found interesting was the frequent references to Western canonical works. There are occasional mentions of Central/Eastern European works (e.g., Rachmaninoff and Kafka). I’m not certain if this was deliberate or not, but it was striking juxtaposed to the particular setting of a nation that was—for the most part—isolated for a period of time. Yet, the numerous references not only to the arts of various origins but also geographic places present a sense of timelessness and cosmopolitan quality to this collection. In doing so, Mort spins a fascinating mythos around what she wrote, wrapping the reader in stories as opposed to reality.
As previously mentioned, the most notable subject throughout this collection is music or, rather, anything pertaining to sound. Mort not only made multiple references and allegories to music, but silence is emphasized in a metaphorical and literal sense to share what it was like to be silenced. Music is not only the subject, but also a central part of these poems’ structures. There is a distinct rhythm to many of Mort’s poems, as well as careful consideration of how words sound next to one another. In doing so, Mort simultaneously depicts a respect for the living (through the sounds of words) and the dead (through the sounds of stories found in these words).
Note: I received this collection of poems from NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an honest review.
April 11, 2021
Haunting, beautiful, and vivid, I loved Valzhyna Mort’s latest collection. As a native of Belarus, the poet’s Eastern European sensibility is on display as she grapples with the prevalence of death and its legacy to create a work of true beauty.
January 16, 2021
I didn't expect to be steamrolled by a book of poetry, but here we are, staring up at the sky.
My reflections:
Each word taps at my bones. Want and fear are buried like mass graves in every line. This is a modern Requiem, a kind of baptismal death, sung by the trees, our sentinel witnesses.
Highly recommend.
My reflections:
Each word taps at my bones. Want and fear are buried like mass graves in every line. This is a modern Requiem, a kind of baptismal death, sung by the trees, our sentinel witnesses.
Highly recommend.
July 30, 2023
liked a lot, quite striking! but some of it felt pretty untappable to me wee brain
April 26, 2022
from "An Attempt at Genealogy"
"4
Days of merciless snow in the kitchen window—
snow was deposited like fat under our skin.
How large we grew on those days!
So much time spent at the kitchen table
trying to decide where to put commas
in sentences about made-up lives,
yet no one bothered to tell us
that words, once uttered,
crowd in the brain as in a hospital lobby.
That time is supposed to heal
only because once
it was seen with a scalpel in its hands.
You’ve made a mistake, you’d say mysteriously,
pointing at lines written by a child. Think
of another word with the same root.
As if words can have roots.
As if words didn’t come from darkness,
cat-in-the-bag words,
as if our human roots were already
known to us.
Here’s Grammar, here’s Orthography,
here’s a paper rag, “Bread, milk, butter.”
What roots? What morphology? What rules
of subjugation? How is it even possible
to make a mistake? Here’s Physics, Chemistry,
Geometry with its atlas, now,
where are Vaclav’s letters,
1946?
What to do about the etymology of us?
Our etymology?
1946 crowds my hospital lobby.
(...)
12
Put your bones into braids of graves, woods.
Put your bones into braids of graves, ravines.
Put your bones into braids of graves, fields.
Put your bones into braids of graves, swamps.
Put your graves into braids of bones, mother.
Put your graves into braids of bones, moth.
Put your graves into braids of bones, ghost.
Put your graves into braids of bones, guest.
Braid your bones neatly.
Braid your bones bravely.
Finger-comb your bones
into neat braids
in our woods, ravines, fields, swamps.
"4
Days of merciless snow in the kitchen window—
snow was deposited like fat under our skin.
How large we grew on those days!
So much time spent at the kitchen table
trying to decide where to put commas
in sentences about made-up lives,
yet no one bothered to tell us
that words, once uttered,
crowd in the brain as in a hospital lobby.
That time is supposed to heal
only because once
it was seen with a scalpel in its hands.
You’ve made a mistake, you’d say mysteriously,
pointing at lines written by a child. Think
of another word with the same root.
As if words can have roots.
As if words didn’t come from darkness,
cat-in-the-bag words,
as if our human roots were already
known to us.
Here’s Grammar, here’s Orthography,
here’s a paper rag, “Bread, milk, butter.”
What roots? What morphology? What rules
of subjugation? How is it even possible
to make a mistake? Here’s Physics, Chemistry,
Geometry with its atlas, now,
where are Vaclav’s letters,
1946?
What to do about the etymology of us?
Our etymology?
1946 crowds my hospital lobby.
(...)
12
Put your bones into braids of graves, woods.
Put your bones into braids of graves, ravines.
Put your bones into braids of graves, fields.
Put your bones into braids of graves, swamps.
Put your graves into braids of bones, mother.
Put your graves into braids of bones, moth.
Put your graves into braids of bones, ghost.
Put your graves into braids of bones, guest.
Braid your bones neatly.
Braid your bones bravely.
Finger-comb your bones
into neat braids
in our woods, ravines, fields, swamps.
April 13, 2021
See the conductor punching out eyes
of sleeping passengers.
What is it about my face
that turns it into a document,
into a ticket stretched out by a neck?
Why does unfolding this starched bedding
feel like
skinning someone invisible?
Why can't the spoons, head-down in glasses, stop screaming?
Shhh...
The chestnuts are about to speak.
—'Nocturne for a Moving Train', p71
of sleeping passengers.
What is it about my face
that turns it into a document,
into a ticket stretched out by a neck?
Why does unfolding this starched bedding
feel like
skinning someone invisible?
Why can't the spoons, head-down in glasses, stop screaming?
Shhh...
The chestnuts are about to speak.
—'Nocturne for a Moving Train', p71
January 29, 2021
"How could it be that I’m from this Earth, / yet trees are also from this Earth?"
i've never seen a poet who nails every single adventurous & unexpected metaphor until i read Mort!! truly stunning collection! every poem is a stand out!
i've never seen a poet who nails every single adventurous & unexpected metaphor until i read Mort!! truly stunning collection! every poem is a stand out!
May 26, 2024
Jag vill plagiera och klippa ut varenda sida. Vilket omnipotent hantverk. Helt klart en författare att ha i åtanke. Knockad och avundsjuk på hur Mort balanserar det personliga, metahistoria, klär politik i fantasityger och får in lite good old diskbänksrealism i sina strofer.
August 20, 2023
Valzhyna Valzhyna. Her book is written in English but she knows and translates her native language Belarusian, as well as Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish.
Music for the Dead and Resurrected is very strong and lithe like a body. I noticed she has so many physical images and allusions to the body. “A rotary phone is my gene pool.” “Shut it lip-logs.” “Bitten elbows”
Names rock my brain—Yanina, Gregor Samsa, Baba Bronya.
So here is a piece, an end of a poem i liked called “Ode to Branca”
Bless a life in which, still a child, I give a salute
and the book of my armpit opens
showing my black letters already grown.
And the voice that has led me
into the minds of trains and city buses,
into the minds of meat and milk shops?
On Branca’s closed eyelids I put
her snow-white pills.
Music for the Dead and Resurrected is very strong and lithe like a body. I noticed she has so many physical images and allusions to the body. “A rotary phone is my gene pool.” “Shut it lip-logs.” “Bitten elbows”
Names rock my brain—Yanina, Gregor Samsa, Baba Bronya.
So here is a piece, an end of a poem i liked called “Ode to Branca”
Bless a life in which, still a child, I give a salute
and the book of my armpit opens
showing my black letters already grown.
And the voice that has led me
into the minds of trains and city buses,
into the minds of meat and milk shops?
On Branca’s closed eyelids I put
her snow-white pills.
November 4, 2020
I had read Factory of Tears by this poet and was interested to read a collection that she wrote without a potential barrier of translation in my reading of it. While there were moments of beauty and several striking images in this collection-- particularly of music and history-- I almost wish it was a memoir instead. ("does everything have to be like a poem?") My favorite poems here tended to be the most narrative.
As another reviewer mentioned, sometimes the Western images seemed jarring, and I didn't always find the repetition effective either. That being said, the whole collection does have a haunted, melodic feel to it in the best possible way. I will continue to seek out what Valzhyna Mort writes.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
As another reviewer mentioned, sometimes the Western images seemed jarring, and I didn't always find the repetition effective either. That being said, the whole collection does have a haunted, melodic feel to it in the best possible way. I will continue to seek out what Valzhyna Mort writes.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
March 18, 2024
I found a new favorite poet.
Read
May 14, 2023(No rating bc I don’t like poetry and this wasn’t an exception lol)
“There’s uncertainty
I would grow into a real person.”
“There’s uncertainty
I would grow into a real person.”
November 6, 2022
[ 2.5 stars ] 'Music for the Dead and Resurrected' is a haunting, descriptive poetry collection by Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, draws on a first-hand account of a past grandparent generation of the Soviet labor camps, redistribution of land, and massacres of World War II in Belarus. My favourite poem in this collection is 'Genesis'- especially the opening line: "I've always preferred Cain".
She questions "does everything have to be like a poem?". To answer: no, they don't have to be. I think it would have interesting to see what this collection would have been like as creative non-fiction or maybe even a memoir instead? Despite saying that, these poems are powerful and tell the narrative of Belarus and it's turbulent history.
Thank you to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for granting me this free eARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinion are my own, unbiased views.
She questions "does everything have to be like a poem?". To answer: no, they don't have to be. I think it would have interesting to see what this collection would have been like as creative non-fiction or maybe even a memoir instead? Despite saying that, these poems are powerful and tell the narrative of Belarus and it's turbulent history.
Thank you to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for granting me this free eARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinion are my own, unbiased views.
Read
February 28, 2021Many of the poems in Valzhyna Mort’s collection Music for the Dead and Resurrected are experientially akin to watching someone break a major bone in front of you. Their visceral honesty and unflinching gaze demand that the reader contend with the horrors of life in Soviet Belarus. Her use of repetition can become hypnotic, snaring the reader in a web of Mort’s making. Under the blank stares of elder relatives, children in her poems explore a world they don’t quite realize has been devastated before their time. Violence in Mort’s work is as atmospheric as the drifting radiation from Chernobyl. With too many dead to count, Mort’s catechismic and hallucinogenic pieces create a ritual of grieving imbued with an unsinkable optimism.
March 21, 2022
The life implicit to Mort's imagery is what captivates me. The book not only describes and elaborates a world conforming to Mort's personal history, it circulates the life of those images. It compounds the life of that world with its imaginative energy. It's like a running dirge of Soviet history in Belarus and also the particular life this poet has moved through.
August 18, 2024
Where am I from? Embodied weather of one hardly-known country.
Where am I from?
Neither papa's nor mama's, my round face takes after a rotary phone.
Blood is talking! Inside the receiver I hear a crackling as if fire were calling.
My frightened alphabet wears its best Sunday handwriting.
I'll swear myself your subject. I'm your student to the bone. "His strange heart beating next to mine" and yada yada.
Sitting a breath away from you, I'm afraid
of my tongue's shadow moving in the corners
of my mouth.
whether I hold it back or thrust it so deep in your throat that to come out it has to become a song...
Once, on a dark rainy street, I walked into a large pile of leaves, disturbing it with my boot. A maimed raven walked out, large, heavy-chested, its wing hanging like a black cabbage leaf. “You have disturbed me,” she said, as she limped, bison-shaped, straight into traffic.
But, where am I from?
On Earth, where all disease is cured by walking, zoobrr walks out of the woods, looks straight into the face of what's to come, a sylvan angel of history, a bison of melancholia, a black van.
Still, where? From our woods that only conifers get to escape, where rootless, amnesiac, they are built into ships that cross the ocean like a street.
To change the direction of thought? To fix a misspelled letter of your name? I see I have disturbed you.
I arrive and at once borders spill. I carry my zoobrr inside me. Absence of explanation is my survival trick.
I rush -- I learned to rush from Earth!
Where language was a dog on a chain of iron words
and punishment was a hundred lashes of silence...
But where? In my stomach is the midnight of bread, the abyss of cognac,
and when Caravaggio honestly painted the dirt under his fingernails...
For me, a four-legged table is a pet.
(A country?)
We pulled this house over our heads like a cast
to heal fractured sanity, thought to thought.
How large we grew on those days! So much time spent at the kitchen table
trying to decide where to put commas in sentences about made-up lives
Days of merciless snow in the kitchen window -
The sky hung from the lightning's thread - does everything have to be like a poem?
----
Should I go ahead and profess
that in the name
of that man who played any instrument thrown at him
-- a cimbalom, a mandolin, a fiddle --
but ended up quickly killable
once thrown into a war
(not even a Great one at that)
I was drafted into music.
"Notes are the bodies rounded and flattened by day's labor, either utterly dark or insanely empty inside. This is what makes music so poignant, so painful"
Notes are also (according to Y.) ladles. So, music is a family brawl?
I enter my years of nightmares and utter terror of being (by) myself.
My nightmares stop when, in my mid-twenties, I quit studying music.
---
In winter, when shadows insulate the walls, my ghosts, come out, take a breath,
I'll be waiting there. I'll bring
fresh dog-rose tea in our Chinese thermos.
Don't cast a shadow. Keep your coat on. And please come flying, a comet.
Where am I from?
Neither papa's nor mama's, my round face takes after a rotary phone.
Blood is talking! Inside the receiver I hear a crackling as if fire were calling.
My frightened alphabet wears its best Sunday handwriting.
I'll swear myself your subject. I'm your student to the bone. "His strange heart beating next to mine" and yada yada.
Sitting a breath away from you, I'm afraid
of my tongue's shadow moving in the corners
of my mouth.
whether I hold it back or thrust it so deep in your throat that to come out it has to become a song...
Once, on a dark rainy street, I walked into a large pile of leaves, disturbing it with my boot. A maimed raven walked out, large, heavy-chested, its wing hanging like a black cabbage leaf. “You have disturbed me,” she said, as she limped, bison-shaped, straight into traffic.
But, where am I from?
On Earth, where all disease is cured by walking, zoobrr walks out of the woods, looks straight into the face of what's to come, a sylvan angel of history, a bison of melancholia, a black van.
Still, where? From our woods that only conifers get to escape, where rootless, amnesiac, they are built into ships that cross the ocean like a street.
To change the direction of thought? To fix a misspelled letter of your name? I see I have disturbed you.
I arrive and at once borders spill. I carry my zoobrr inside me. Absence of explanation is my survival trick.
I rush -- I learned to rush from Earth!
Where language was a dog on a chain of iron words
and punishment was a hundred lashes of silence...
But where? In my stomach is the midnight of bread, the abyss of cognac,
and when Caravaggio honestly painted the dirt under his fingernails...
For me, a four-legged table is a pet.
(A country?)
We pulled this house over our heads like a cast
to heal fractured sanity, thought to thought.
How large we grew on those days! So much time spent at the kitchen table
trying to decide where to put commas in sentences about made-up lives
Days of merciless snow in the kitchen window -
The sky hung from the lightning's thread - does everything have to be like a poem?
----
Should I go ahead and profess
that in the name
of that man who played any instrument thrown at him
-- a cimbalom, a mandolin, a fiddle --
but ended up quickly killable
once thrown into a war
(not even a Great one at that)
I was drafted into music.
"Notes are the bodies rounded and flattened by day's labor, either utterly dark or insanely empty inside. This is what makes music so poignant, so painful"
Notes are also (according to Y.) ladles. So, music is a family brawl?
I enter my years of nightmares and utter terror of being (by) myself.
My nightmares stop when, in my mid-twenties, I quit studying music.
---
In winter, when shadows insulate the walls, my ghosts, come out, take a breath,
I'll be waiting there. I'll bring
fresh dog-rose tea in our Chinese thermos.
Don't cast a shadow. Keep your coat on. And please come flying, a comet.
May 6, 2022
"Absence of my blood from your history books
is the reason why, in the autumn, fog spreads itself on earth
in a silent protest."
from Music for a Girl's Voice and Bison
I bought this on a whim based on something I saw on Twitter. Weirdly.
Valzhyna Mort is a Belorussian poet and translator. The poetry explores growing up on Belarus and how you can keep your history and your memories when the - nameless obviously - authorities don't want you to remember. Certainly not publicly.
"One by one, streets introduce themselves
with the names of national
murderers."
from Bus Stops: Ars Poetica
Oddly my two favourite poems in the collection were the first long prose poem, 'Self-Portrait With The Palace of the Republic' and the last long poem, 'Music for a Girl's Voice and Bison'. Mort has a gift for good titles. Sometimes the poetry is allusive and illusive. I'm not going to pretend I understood everything or could grasp some of what the more surreal imagery meant. I am a bear of very little brain.
But the centre of this collection seems to be how everything is a memory. Every tree digs its roots into land packed with the dead. The murdered.
"Braid your bones neatly.
Braid your bones bravely.
Finger-comb your bones
into neat braids
in our woods, ravines, fields, swamps."
from An Attempt at Genealogy, 12
This would make a find poetic companion to 'Bloodlands' by Timothy Snyder.
This is the third collection from Mort and at some point, when I've got some money, I'll try to pick up the previous two. And I'll come back to this. There's more to be got from it than on my first read. I've said before that poetry doesn't need to open up its meaning on first reading. Sometimes you have to unpick it, dwell on the imagery. And I don't have a problem with that.
PS The author photograph on the back of this Bloomsbury edition made me think of Maria Falconetti as Joan d'Arc.
is the reason why, in the autumn, fog spreads itself on earth
in a silent protest."
from Music for a Girl's Voice and Bison
I bought this on a whim based on something I saw on Twitter. Weirdly.
Valzhyna Mort is a Belorussian poet and translator. The poetry explores growing up on Belarus and how you can keep your history and your memories when the - nameless obviously - authorities don't want you to remember. Certainly not publicly.
"One by one, streets introduce themselves
with the names of national
murderers."
from Bus Stops: Ars Poetica
Oddly my two favourite poems in the collection were the first long prose poem, 'Self-Portrait With The Palace of the Republic' and the last long poem, 'Music for a Girl's Voice and Bison'. Mort has a gift for good titles. Sometimes the poetry is allusive and illusive. I'm not going to pretend I understood everything or could grasp some of what the more surreal imagery meant. I am a bear of very little brain.
But the centre of this collection seems to be how everything is a memory. Every tree digs its roots into land packed with the dead. The murdered.
"Braid your bones neatly.
Braid your bones bravely.
Finger-comb your bones
into neat braids
in our woods, ravines, fields, swamps."
from An Attempt at Genealogy, 12
This would make a find poetic companion to 'Bloodlands' by Timothy Snyder.
This is the third collection from Mort and at some point, when I've got some money, I'll try to pick up the previous two. And I'll come back to this. There's more to be got from it than on my first read. I've said before that poetry doesn't need to open up its meaning on first reading. Sometimes you have to unpick it, dwell on the imagery. And I don't have a problem with that.
PS The author photograph on the back of this Bloomsbury edition made me think of Maria Falconetti as Joan d'Arc.
Read
October 20, 2021I heard about this book through Mort's recent-ish NPR interview. The accordion, the Eastern European legacy of war and loss, the wish to push back against being just a statistic -- all this resounded with me strongly.
Once I found a copy of the book, many of the pieces were really hard for me to get into -- I regret I'm not much of a poetry reader nowadays. But a few of them really stayed with me:
* "Music Practice"
* "A Song for a Raised Voice and a Screwdriver"
* "Baba Bronya"
[Alas, I cannot find this one online anywhere, and it's too long to transcribe; but I recognize the gloomy concrete blocks, war survivors telling their stories, painful music lessons. And this excerpt:]
* Finally, this excerpt from "Music for Girl's Voice and Bison":
Once I found a copy of the book, many of the pieces were really hard for me to get into -- I regret I'm not much of a poetry reader nowadays. But a few of them really stayed with me:
* "Music Practice"
* "A Song for a Raised Voice and a Screwdriver"
* "Baba Bronya"
[Alas, I cannot find this one online anywhere, and it's too long to transcribe; but I recognize the gloomy concrete blocks, war survivors telling their stories, painful music lessons. And this excerpt:]
Above all, Bronya is hated for never having children: when you do not have children, you do not have to see them die one after another during the war.
* Finally, this excerpt from "Music for Girl's Voice and Bison":
Trojan bison of history,
Zoobrr, forgotten by Adam,
Zoobrr, filed as uncategorized in the depth of woods.
A people, misspelled, underlined
in red, filed as uncategorized in the depth
of apartment blocks.
May 24, 2021
"My motherland is a raw yolk inside a Faberge egg./ This yolk is what gives gold its color." ("An Attempt at Genealogy," 21)
As well as having beautiful lines that stop the reader in their tracks and make them contemplate - as in the quote above, which made me suck my breath in because of how personally it hit - "Music for the Dead and Resurrected" is also rich in affect. There is an atmosphere that hangs over the poems that's impossible to describe. I think part of it is because of how masterfully Mort uses repetition, integrating the same words, phrases, lines across several poems to form links. Even when the same poem repeats the same image - the first example that comes to mind is "State of Light: 1986" - it is a testament to Mort's power as a poet that the poems do not suffer from this. It doesn't feel like repetition but takes on a quality of haunting. I was lost in this collection, marveling at the poems as well as thinking about how some of what Mort describes echoes what I learned from my parents about Ukrainian history. The overlap made the reading experience personal and that much more impactful, but even for those with no knowledge or connection to the events that Mort describes, the poems themselves are enough to make you fall head-over-heels.
As well as having beautiful lines that stop the reader in their tracks and make them contemplate - as in the quote above, which made me suck my breath in because of how personally it hit - "Music for the Dead and Resurrected" is also rich in affect. There is an atmosphere that hangs over the poems that's impossible to describe. I think part of it is because of how masterfully Mort uses repetition, integrating the same words, phrases, lines across several poems to form links. Even when the same poem repeats the same image - the first example that comes to mind is "State of Light: 1986" - it is a testament to Mort's power as a poet that the poems do not suffer from this. It doesn't feel like repetition but takes on a quality of haunting. I was lost in this collection, marveling at the poems as well as thinking about how some of what Mort describes echoes what I learned from my parents about Ukrainian history. The overlap made the reading experience personal and that much more impactful, but even for those with no knowledge or connection to the events that Mort describes, the poems themselves are enough to make you fall head-over-heels.
June 2, 2022
Music for the Dead and Resurrected is a deeply haunting and melodic collection of poetry that acted as a doorway into Mort's ideas on the purpose of poetry, state violence, and Belarusian identity. She paints a world in readers' heads of vivid metaphors and striking images, all depicting the contradictions of life and the power of words. I LOVED how she had me reflecting on the purposes of war, the impacts of famine, and the worst criminal cases in the past century in the first ten pages. When I started this book I had not expected to be delving into my sense of self and identity, as the name of the book seems like it'd be about supernatural beings and their taste in music (if you look at it literally.) My favorite poem from this collection is called "Cain" and I think it's the most emotional poem I've ever read, even though it's a short 10 lines long. The length of the poem I think adds to the appeal and mystery of it all, and although I would KILL for it to be longer, I understand that it wouldn't capture the message in the same way. My favorite quote is also from "Cain," and it's, "aren't we indeed the keepers of our dead?" This really made me reflect on what unwanted but necessary burdens we all carry, and this book in general may or may not have made me shed a tear.
December 26, 2020
Valzhyna Mort grabs onto the horrific particularity of institutional/political violence, tracing its lineage through a carefully constructed collection that, in speaking the pains of individual Belarusians, forges a global voice.
These are poems concerned with rhythm, bones, teeth, snow as dirt, deaths, memory via recitation, West/East, Eve, and Adam. They coat the reader with the irradiating ash of history; the intensity of Belarusian wrought into English through the ferocity of an astonishing poetic will.
“Psalm 18” (first section)
I pray to the trees and language migrates down my legs like mute cattle.
I pray to the wooden meat that never left its roots.
I, too, am meat braided into a string of thought.
I pray to the trees:
luminescent in the dark garden
is the square star
of a window frame, my old bedroom.
Ghosts, my teachers!
These are poems concerned with rhythm, bones, teeth, snow as dirt, deaths, memory via recitation, West/East, Eve, and Adam. They coat the reader with the irradiating ash of history; the intensity of Belarusian wrought into English through the ferocity of an astonishing poetic will.
“Psalm 18” (first section)
I pray to the trees and language migrates down my legs like mute cattle.
I pray to the wooden meat that never left its roots.
I, too, am meat braided into a string of thought.
I pray to the trees:
luminescent in the dark garden
is the square star
of a window frame, my old bedroom.
Ghosts, my teachers!
February 28, 2022
What when trauma, displacement, pain pervades your family's and your people's legacy? What if you'd like to bury the dead, but the dead are the legacy? And you're cut off. What does that make your "where-from"? What would make a "proper" burial? "Music for the Dead and Resurrected" finds and provides the music, with utter poignancy, stripping pain of all its euphemisms unsparingly. The music is discordant and refuses to flow in classical chords. The speaker's accordion (a recurring theme) becomes a heavy burden in her lap, a giant spider latching onto her torso, or an altar: a powerful metaphor for the burden of inherited pain. I greatly admire how the voice of the collection is unapologetically and fiercely herself, and the fearlessly mordant humor. Pick any line and it will burst its seams.
November 13, 2021
Poetry is really not my thing but I have enjoyed most of what I have read in the past few years, however this collection is more of the type that has intimidated me in the past. Word by word it is beautiful and it is lovely to read out loud but I struggled to make sense of the whole (although this is much more likely to be my fault than that of the poet). To its detriment I probably tried to base my reading too much on the blurb rather than applying my own interpretation so I may often have been looking for things that were not always have been there. The parts that I did understand however were incredibly powerful and I still found the rest beautiful to read so a tentative four stars from me.
August 5, 2021
"In my motherland people kneel before wells. / In my motherland people pray to the crosses of flying birds." ("An Attempt at Genealogy")
"At the next stop: my ghosts, come out, take a breath, / I'd be waiting there. I'd bring / fresh dog rose tea in our Chinese thermos." ("Psalm 18")
"A yolk of honey in a glass of cooling milk. / Bats playful like butterflies on power lines. / In all your stories blood hangs like braids // of drying onions." ("Singer")
"Absence of my blood from your history books / is the reason why, in the fall, fog spreads itself on earth / in a silent protest." ("Music for Girl's Voice and Bison")
"At the next stop: my ghosts, come out, take a breath, / I'd be waiting there. I'd bring / fresh dog rose tea in our Chinese thermos." ("Psalm 18")
"A yolk of honey in a glass of cooling milk. / Bats playful like butterflies on power lines. / In all your stories blood hangs like braids // of drying onions." ("Singer")
"Absence of my blood from your history books / is the reason why, in the fall, fog spreads itself on earth / in a silent protest." ("Music for Girl's Voice and Bison")
June 14, 2022
this collection. where do I even begin. it's wholly consuming and terrifying and yet infinitely tender, human, intimate. the poems detail the shapes of war and all the generations it has touched, placed into fractured wor(l)ds, mythologies, gnarly and gory creatures. i definitely need to re-read it because the language is absolutely insane in this one, the juxtapositions and pauses entirely unexpected yet so well-placed you're left breathless. my only complaint is that because so much effort and weight are placed into the language, the meaning is sometimes lost on me (hence the re-reading). 4.5
January 24, 2021
Stunning. Mort's poems combine the visual brilliance of Chagall to the verbal acuity of Celan, producing a landscape of deprivation and suffering that is grotesquely exhilarating. Reading this book is like riding an express train through that landscape, staring out the window: you can't wait to see where this is going next, though you also want to linger over every image. And all the while you're glad you're safe in here and not out there.
February 21, 2024
My favorite poems:
To Antigone, a Dispatch
Genesis
An Attempt at Genealogy
Washday
Little Songs
Rose Pandemic
New Year in Vishnyowka
Gamma Rays
Baba Bronya
Ode to Branca
State of Light: 1986
To Ingeborg Bachmann in Rome
Music for Girl's Voice and Bison
Beautiful poems with graphic imagery and hints of violence.
To Antigone, a Dispatch
Genesis
An Attempt at Genealogy
Washday
Little Songs
Rose Pandemic
New Year in Vishnyowka
Gamma Rays
Baba Bronya
Ode to Branca
State of Light: 1986
To Ingeborg Bachmann in Rome
Music for Girl's Voice and Bison
Beautiful poems with graphic imagery and hints of violence.
March 10, 2021
This book of poems worked so well as a collection - they were all necessary to bring the reader through this poet's world, the history, family, and personal. It captures a Soviet/Eastern European experience so well.
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