Ilya Kaminsky

Lullaby

Poems

• 1 We Lived Happily During the War
• 2 That Map of Bone and Opened Valves
• 3 While Helicopters Circle, Sonya and Alfonso Drink in the Shower
• 4 Of Weddings Before the War
• 5 Alfonso in Snow
• 6 Mother Throws Milk Bottles at Soldiers
• 7 10 AM Bombardment
• 8 Between Arrests
• 9 [I kissed a woman]
• 10 To Live
• 11 Lullaby
• 12 Elegy | Translations: tr
• 13 Widower Alfonso
• 14 A Child in His Arms
• 15 Traffic

Language: english

Lullaby

Little daughter
rainwater-

snow and branches protect you
white-washed walls--

and neighbors’ hands, also.
child of my aprils

little earth of
six pounds—

my white hair
keeps your sleep lit.

Translations:

Ilya Kaminsky

photo © Cybele Knowles

* 18.04.1977, Odessa, Ukraine
lives in: San Diego, California, United States

Ilya Kaminsky was born in 1977 in Odessa in the Ukraine and started writing poems even as a youth in the Soviet Union. In 1993 he emigrated to the USA, where his family was granted asylum. At first he continued writing in Russian there, but in 2002 published his first collection of poems written in English, Musica Humana. His collection Dancing in Odessa (2004) earned him several prizes including the Metcalf Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Lannan Fellowship.
Kaminsky is among other things the editor in chief of Poetry International and the poetry editor of Words Without Borders. He is also the director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute in Chicago and works as a translator from the Russian. His poetry, which has been translated into several different languages, has gained him a great amount of attention around the world. He lives in San Diego, California.

photo © Mirko Lux

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