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Confluences: A Collection of Poems
by Gari Light
53 Poems ~ 3 Illustrations ~ 112 pages
Original photography, by Gari Light
Cover Photography, by Anya Korolyova
Design & Layout, by Yulia Tymoshenko
Cover Design, by Larisa Studinskaya
Price: $14.99
Publisher: Bagriy & Company
In Cooperation with Kayala Publishing, Silver Spring, MD
ISBN #: 978-1-7344460-0-5
To Order: Amazon
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Webster’s dictionary defines the word “confluence,” as “A coming or flowing together, meeting, or gather at one point.” Gari Light’s seminal work is a study in bringing together separate but related life-streams. These seem to manifest themselves in combinations of three. Bodies of water: rivers, lakes, oceans; languages, English, Russian, Ukrainian; the human condition: materialism, power, pride; quests for dominance through war, peace, and reconciliation. This unique, original collection will touch the body, mind, and soul.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
“Well into his third decade as a poet, Light uses his mature voice in Confluences to translate multicultural images and locales. These are truly love poems and war songs crafted as universal encounters on those battlefields.”
–Lennart Lundh, author of The River Singing, Workhorse, 2019
Beautiful poems by Gari Light, who writes poems both in Russian and in English. These English poems by Gari have the same energy and elegance as his Russian poems, and they are enriched by his multilayered, polyphonic use of the English language to express thoughts and feelings with sophistication and humor.”
–Nina Kossman, editor of the anthology Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths, Oxford University Press, 2001
“Gari Light’s English-language debut poetry collection features meditative, streams-of-consciousness prose poems in free verse, a deviation from his strictly metered Russian poetry. Confluences–the meeting points of experiences put together … These poems are like seascapes, or better yet dreamscapes, sweeping the reader into a swirl.”
–Stella Hayes, author of One Strange Country, What Books Press, 2020
“To read Gari Light’s poetry is to take a journey to far-flung places: Ukraine, Prague, the ravines of Babi Yar, Jerusalem, Chicago, Leonard Cohen’s New York City apartment and, even, into the atmosphere, thirty-five miles above the earth, looking down at the Hudson Valley. So evocative is the poet’s language, so affecting are his deeply felt emotions, that the reader feels invited to take a piece of each place as a keepsake or talisman; so as to forget neither the beauty nor the horror of it all.”
–David Silverman, author of And God Created Hummus, Glass Lyre Press, 2019.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1967, Gari Light has lived in the United States since 1980. He graduated from Northwestern University with a Departmental Honors B.A. in Slavic Literatures Studies in 1989. Light became a lawyer some short time after, and worked in the area of international jurisprudence, in the U.S, and abroad. Since 1993, Gari’s poetry is published regularly in the literary journals and poetry anthologies of the United States, Canada, Israel, Europe, and Ukraine. He is a member of the American PEN Center and the Writer’s Union of Ukraine. Light’s several books of poetry were published in Russian, starting in 1992. The most recent collection, entitled The Return Trajectories has been published simultaneously in the U.S. and Ukraine in 2017. It was awarded the Ukrainian Writers Union’s Literary Prize for the best collection of original poetry published in that year. Gari regularly takes part in poetry readings and other literary events on both sides of the Atlantic.
FROM THE BOOK:
Let the Ocean Behold
by Gari Light
Let the ocean behold
the reflection of the heavens,
then–refute the misconception
of it being soft and tender
with Cesaria Evora
or the sounds of brasiliero,
be absolved now and forever,
of attempts on soul collecting,
as it’s wedged into horizons
as an optical illusion
of all those who gazed and wandered
through the waters, being mortal …
It is not a panacea,
nor is it a cleansing being,
but it rather is an owner
of all those repeated errors
by those self-absorbed fanatics
who were always so certain
at the end of appearing blind …
Let the ocean behold
the mundane understanding of nature,
on the hope that it isn’t vindictive
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