My Hollywood and Other Poems by Boris Dralyuk

Abstract

Reviewed by: My Hollywood and Other Poems by Boris Dralyuk Dustin Condren Boris Dralyuk My Hollywood and Other Poems Philadelphia. Paul Dry Books. 2022. 69 pages. a little over halfway through Boris Dralyuk's new collection of poems, in one of its many sonnets, the reader meets a beguiling but familiar image: a man sealed in the dark belly of a giant fish, encountering the moldering traces of those ingested before him, and gradually losing grip of his senses. This is Jonah—so the poem's title tells us before we begin—and in the halting iambs and clever slant rhymes of the first eight lines, his mythic plight is introduced with a wry realism that sits us right down in the "scales and slime" of the piscine prison. But as the poem moves into its concluding sestet, a delicate and meaningful shift in tone occurs—the lines smooth themselves out, the rhymes sharpen and clarify, and the implications of Jonah's predicament alter. The trick with Dralyuk's Jonah is that he becomes a potent if darkling figure for the émigré: a hero for whom the whale belly is no three-day stopping place but, just possibly, an everlasting home. Inside the beast, the trial, it turns out, is not one of penitence or obedience but of endurance, of loneliness, of the stranger in a truly strange land. This Jonah-as-exile is less a surprise than an early apotheosis, coming where it does in My Hollywood, since the volume's thoroughgoing motif is one of displacement and the displaced: phantom geographies, absent presences, existential superimpositions, all manner of flickering mediations abound. As with the iterations of this theme in many of the book's other poems, the beauty of "Jonah" is that Dralyuk is straightforward in his wish to make exilic grief and nostalgia sing: in the stillness of the foreign innards, lulled by "the rhythm of the tide," Jonah finally heeds the call to give voice to his ordeal (we've been told "he hadn't written anything in years"), and in the sonnet's final, truncated line, he composes a psalm. The best rejoinder, it seems, to the inexorable injustices of space and time is the poetic utterance. Dralyuk was born in Odesa and came to California with his family as an adolescent in the 1990s, growing into adulthood in the vast, multifarious Russian-speaking community of Los Angeles. The essence of this origin story touches all levels of the volume's compositions. Duality is the fundamental mechanism of tension: the past haunts the present (although its former existence often feels profoundly impossible) and the forsaken homeland is uncannily close at hand in the new one. For this sort of cultural and geographic projection, Los Angeles—and specifically Hollywood—turns out to be the perfect screen, capacious and expressive enough to host a variety of characters, sets, unexpected encounters, both real and imaginary, a land already rife with infinite doubles and stand-ins. An example: the book opens with an eponymous triptych, "My Hollywood," made up of three intricately connected Onegin sonnets, each excavating in the evanescent Hollywood landscape figures of transient prominence and inevitable disappearance. The first poem of the triptych, "Aspiration," ironizes the title (another irreconcilable duality: ambition into thin air) of the unremembered monument to Rudolph Valentino, an Italian émigré, that stands in De Long-pre Park—prior to a 2020 retooling by the city, one of Hollywood's less savory green spaces. In the poem's conclusive rhymed couplet, the "clacking" of a crow above the statue invokes a film projector "slowly going dead." The second, "The Flower Painter," is an elegy to Paul de [End Page 64] Longpré, a French oil painter who found renown after moving to Hollywood in 1899 and became the namesake of the previous poem's park and the avenue on which it is located. Here it is De Longpré's Mission Revival mansion and legendary flower garden, both destroyed by developers in the 1920s, that are lamented, their former glory recurring cruelly in the name of a cheap apartment building and the "scruffy rose bush" that preens in front of it. The triptych's third member...