“…I rule
Myself no longer; I am not my own.”
     —Kochanowski, trans. by Ruth Earl Merrill

“The sister’s shadow hovers through the silent grove
To greet the spirits of the heroes, the bleeding heads…”
     —from Trakl’s “Grodek”, trans. by Lindenberger

“Poets know how difficult that is: to write, as Boris Leonidovich
(Pasternak) says, ‘free from poetic mud’…”
     —Anna Akhmatova, from “Chukovskaya’s Journals”

What Anna Akhmatova referred to in the last quote above was a certain poet’s practice of writing without a definite rhythm, which her friend, Lydia Chukovskaya, took exception to. What they did not conceive of at the time was a poetry whose practitioners never went to school with the poets of old, who knew their paces well. Too many today leave behind what they have never been through. Mister Yankevich has the indefinite rhythm of the story-teller’s voice, and I believe he has achieved it through genuinely leaving behind a lot of “poetic mud”.

“The river’s waters are grey, sometimes blue.
They flow into a mermaid’s dream of the sea—
under clouds either Romanesque or Baroque,
but always indifferent.”

The languid strength of the lines draws the interest with ease. The balance of the polar terms, “a mermaid’s dream of the sea” and “a druid’s dream of the beginning”, pleases and intrigues; positing an image of completion as apt and full as “clouds either Romanesque or Baroque”. Glowing aspects of our culture are touched on and left as

“…too heavy and hard to grasp”
because in some way

“…we’ve forgotten why and for whom.”

The poem concludes with a memorably keen conceit which kind of encapsulates the drift of polar terms the poem as a whole shows forth.

“…the sun’s merciful but meat-eating honey.”

The intensely compressed image brings to the fore this poet’s metaphysical quality. It is like Herbert’s “a ragged noise and mirth”, which Eliot harps well on in his “Turnbull Lectures”. Shakespeare’s “Honey Summer” is clearly a merciful dispensation, but that this same honey should be as though “meat-eating” is a great extreme brought into conjunction with its opposite. In the desert the sun eats meat, you could say. And of course the sun’s demesne is associateable with the realm of the gods, fate, deity; and that its honey should seem predatory is telling as respects the whole thrust of the collection. How well, how deeply, how often does the poetry of Mister Yankevich reward the inquiring peer. The “indifferent clouds” hang over all that follows.

“Visiting My Dead Grandmother’s Cottage”, the second poem, is as concretely denotative as the first poem is lyrically connotative. One turns one’s eye back and forth between the two poems just as one did between the Romanesque and Baroque clouds, the merciful and meat-eating honey of the sun. Yet the Cottage poem, for all its concrete catalogue of the detailed real, also manages a true lyrical beauty.

“Visiting her cottage I remember ripe ears of corn…”

“A bucket of stagnant water mirrors the cloudy lard
she must have fried eggs and coffee grinds in every morning.”

“…while my father speaks to an old peasant in a strange tongue
about pagan deities carved on trees when he was young.”

One thinks perhaps of the bowls of milk Czeslaw Milosz recalls having been set out for the water snakes; whose bodies when they died, should they remain unburied, would make the sun cry. It is a powerfully limpid, a quietly structured flow, neither Petrarchan nor Shakespearean nor Miltonic but rather modern, a sort of cinematic collage—whose tone is not cumulatively but dispersedly impactful, yet of a piece. Its is exquisite to the ear of the apprentice of form, that line with its two emphatic indefinite articles,

“…while my father speaks to an old peasant in a strange tongue…”

It is a beautiful sprung-rhythm, six-beat-line sonnet, rhymed placidly to perfection for the reminiscent mode of the story-teller’s voice.

“The tangerine talk/of blackbirds” in the third poem, “Poem in October”, is once more a metaphysical touch, pungent and thought-provoking, and very probably pertinent: I confess my ignorance here, having not listened to blackbirds. Starlings talk in a distinctly screwy manner, like drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth. The poet does not over-do such touches, a temptation to the merely clever, and this restraint lets them be as prominent as set jewels. In the same poem, the “cloud-cursing rooks” is a conception as classically apposite as Homer’s old “wine-dark sea”. Here, moreover, the trouble is broached more piercingly, the ill all the collection tends and moves toward like a drama from the underground unfolding, as if the gentle idiot of Dostoevski were to doubt God cared at all. As if he—versified in his doubt, or began to feel the cold of Ivan Karamazov, say

“And I smell the scent of something burning,
of something smouldering deep within,
fouler than all the hills of Polish dung.

Thirty-five years have transformed my life’s leaves
into an outcast’s smoke upon the breeze.”

The trouble is in the poet himself. Ferried on a pile of combusted Autumn leaves, one wonders admiringly at the development of the showing of this trouble as in the author himself.

Georg Trakl composed a tapestry of “a world apart”. He readily without trying surpassed Rimbaud in this, the flamboyant adolescent. In Trakl there is a seriousness that sustains the interest, even a gravity towards the “bread and wine” on the table when over the threshold comes the stranger to partake with one. For Trakl lived the world he wove and died of the cold, its impingement upon that world’s heart, the Sister’s shadow, by “the bleeding heads”. Rimbaud played at it, and then he left it in a facile disgust.

Mister Yankevich’s poetry is also a tapestry lived, is also impinged on by the cold. He integrates the frore stuff into his poetry with a gathering furor of anguish and distance. His complaint seeks comfort and finds it not, yet then as in “Eschatology”, he distances himself from the entire business to play like Donne with the very idea of the anguish. The name of his world may be called the miraculous Czeslaw Milosz has said poets can voice the longing for; and it is a world that was surely discovered when young, as in a Lithuanian forest, or as on the Chesapeake Bay by the demolished Chamberlain Hotel where Poe wrote “Annabel Lee”—but wherever, it is a world assaulted, and peculiarly so it would seem today. It is still the world of Dante, where God answers calls on Him, or is silent. There, the Grodek, where the crisis happens, can be a scarecrow’s domain, the field where cars pass a straw-gutted golem whose

“…hollow eyes would hate the stars…”

Mister Yankevich writes like the almost miraculous anomaly of a despairing Hans Christian Andersen. His faerie tales are of more and more hells on earth, hells succinct and tersely put, hells heavened very strangely and finely here and there, as if

“till the ghost of the man I’d be—crawled out.”

“digging amid my ribs for a soul.”

The ghost, the wraith, the golem, the scarecrow, the gentle idiot, the name writ in water so well absorbed as to seem his own, are all one: the hope of life infused into lifelessness.

It is not easy to leave behind the terms of his trouble. They follow me through my days. I remember them. The scarecrow in the field. The golem. The little man in us all that yearns for—the finest thing of all.

—Michael Axtell, 1998

Imagine a world whose enduring features are rust, moldy bread, the chill wind from an industrial-gray sky, crows, leafless trees, littered streets, loneliness, urgency and guilt. Such a world offers little to write about, and yet it offers an arena in which longing, despair, poverty, hope and the hints of transformation are the reader’s constant companion.

Leo Yankevich sketches such a world in “The Unfinished Crusade”. Whether it’s real, stylized or imaginary, its presence pervades the poems in this collection. Perhaps this is the world of Poland in the dying phase and the aftermath of communism, or the shattered cityscapes of post-World War II Eastern Europe, or only the imaginary bleakness of a character whose life has taken a constant downward turn into a squalid stasis. In any case, this book is a journal of squalor and its unrelenting presence. Yet, in this bleak rustscape, there is life—persistent life, that of the constantly cawing rooks, the drunk, the leprous woman whose eventual transformation seems to justify her misery, the rats in the cupboard, and the downcast who pass like wraiths outside the flat or in the anonymous city in which the poems play out.

These poems stylize Yankevich’s world, but present it again and again with the repetitiveness of haiku, each with its subtle individuality, offering new insights into the inhabitants of this sad and persistent society.

“The Dog” describes the transformation of a dead dog into a temple through whose bones the wind kneels to pray. “Silesian Landscape” sketches the bleakness of the ruined terrain in January. In it, ravens cough up their blasphemies on a gray day without snow. This image recurs throughout the collection. Yankevich’s ubiquitous rooks are as persistent as Poe’s raven—and more sinister.

“The Prayer” recognizes the succession of life into oblivion as seen through the boy’s resignation to his father’s aging and death, prefiguring his own. This parallels Seamus Heaney’s similar poem about his father, stooping to dig in the potato fields. The agricultural tradition reappears sporadically through the poems of “The Unfinished Crusade”.

“To Touch the April Rain” connects us with the lives of those who created the products and artifacts we touch. Eventually, it all comes to nothing—no one cares. The invocation of the spring rain reminds us of Sara Teasdale’s gentle, sad but equally cynical “There Will Come Soft Rains”:

“And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly”

“Break of Dawn” reveals the poet’s recognition of the certainty of death, the fragility of life, and the felt obligation to make the most of it. It is a rubaiyyat without cheer, an urgent and persistent obligation, without certain reward, to realize the verity of being:

“.No,
on and on you must go;
this life do what you can;
eternity has no end.”

The brevity of life emerges in this poem that contemplates power and guilt at its exercise in “The Moth”:

“He holds it fast, as if intent to show
that all depends upon the power’s whim,
that if he dares to squeeze, or lets it go,
no wrathful god will judge or punish him.

Yet when his hands unfold, his conscience stings:
the powdery, white flakes—were once its wings.”

The villanelle “The Recluse” sketches the loneliness of the poet in the midst of life. “Is it dream or reality he fears?”

In a related and brief excursion into holocaust, “Sarajevo Sonnet” remarks the continuation of life in the stark deprivation after society collapses—the marriage of a young couple next to a skeleton in uniform. The young couple are revealed to be two tiny black beetles.

The collection continues, each poem building on and reinforcing the others in a framework as inexorable and unyielding as the twisted girders of a decaying, once-great medieval city, such as, say, Baltimore or Philadelphia. But now and then a brief and uncertain light illuminates the slag and deformation:

“I’d appeal my sentence, seek solace from seers,
but the child in me knows: beyond destinies
light is everywhere, and redeems us all.”
     (The Bridge)

Yankevich’s book is a memorable and unsettling sketch of the conditions it explores. This review may not adequately express the force of its poems, and readers should take the book as the best guide. As we face continued uncertainty in the global economy and the unease that the future may not be bright, Leo Yankevich’s “The Unfinished Crusade” is a sober description of an alternative and all-too plausible future. Its chronicle of how one person manages the question of the value of life is a reminder and a moral, like the rooks, drunkards and scarecrows that populate his world.

I recommend this book highly.

—Jerry H. Jenkins, 2000