The Many Names for Mother is a compelling book about origins—of ancestry, memory, and language. Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s own origins began in 1987 in Ukraine—still a part of the Soviet Union then—and she came to the United States as a Jewish refugee at the age of six. The poems in this collection are peopled by generations of women, brought to life in lucid, moving detail. Here is her mother:
sweating through
tolkuchka—the little push ’n’ shove bazar—
to return home with a stained skirt and fruit
dangling from her ears
And here she struggles to encompass all her images of mother:
I’ve written you as rivers, as frost, as everything
hidden underneath it…
… as water,
generations and generations of it, mothers’
open hands, as bare Russian birch branches
grasping for clouds, as what a child sees
looking up in a forest.
Many poems are haunted by suffering: war and the holocaust, present-day violence. Dasbach’s gift is to bring the past into relevance; we feel its immediacy, almost urgency. In “Letter to My Son” she writes, “Remember, / when half of your ancestors died, the other half / did the killing.” Her lyricism can be gorgeous; at times she seems to harness the elements, invoking water, earth, sun, and stars throughout in rich combinations, like bits of genetic code. One in a series of poems entitled “Other women don’t tell you” delves into the etymology of the word mother, noting the links to “scum and dregs and filth” but also to “cloud.”
Dasbach is a searching, patient poet, more interested in questions than answers. What gets passed down through generations? What should be remembered? What forgotten? A particularly heartbreaking set of poems explores how to explain the burdens of history, death, and guns to a son: “bang, bang, every night, he sings / all the ways we know how to take.” Though Dasbach does not look away from what is painful and disturbing, there are rich images of pleasure as well. She describes food with sensuous simplicity, “lemons / cut to perfect circles and placed / around a gold-rimmed plate / with pryaniki and sour cream.” She compares the sun to “a Rainier cherry / at its yellow heart, fire / skinned and ripe / with reaching.”
This reaching—for meaning, for understanding—is ever present. Dasbach returns again and again to the ongoing struggle between embracing the past and escaping it. She writes:
The past, a book of mothers
trying to unlearn how hatred
festers in the blood
and passes down.
Another passage speaks of her son’s growing body:
your people’s birth-
and death-days frozen in his bones
though already the days grow longer now
by minutes only like his legs
more ready to walk away
An insistence on history is at the core of Dasbach’s work. I am struck by both its timeliness and timelessness. She explores questions of race and otherness with acute awareness. “Remember, here you are a white man” begins “Letter to My Son.” Then later in the poem, “Know, across the water you are dark.” Her poem “For War and Water” is a powerful update on the traditional lament about sons going to war.
like my boy, born the year before
cops killed even more black boys
and more boys killed other boys
for loving boys and more
swastikas showed up on walls
If some of these poems sound dark, they are. But Dasbach manages a kind of hope. Not by offering false resolutions, but through the moral weight of her words and imagination. In “Inheritance” she gives us a transformative vision of her murdered great-grandfather.
Wounded, pocked, shot through,
he walks beside me now, so close,
sometimes I think I feel his hand.
His body glows with stars.
The Many Names for Mother brings us living history in beautiful, terrible complexity, a world “in flux like sand and water and ancestry.”
—Ellen Bass