Randy Kohan Poetry
Randy Kohan Poetry

Black Marks (2023)

Did you know, or perhaps you’ve just forgotten
that communion’s an intimate act
an exchange, sublime, expressing thoughts
and feelings that we hold?

 And how is it
like tumbling waters on the page
black marks
can shape, move and overflow
the realm we hold within? 

And why is it that we look
to lofty mountains, open skies
snow on balsam fir

Flowered gardens
Autumn light
shadowed birds in flight 

And somehow feel
the presence there
hear the voice of life? 

How is it
this mystery
can live upon the page?
Stir our common sympathy?
Sing its sounds for us? 

I’ll tell you why:
its here we find
our better selves.
Nature never lies.

Cover painting by Karl Skaret

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As a special feature, we've created audio files for 15 selections from An Image is a Place. Piano interludes are played by Sam Kohan.

 
 
 
 

When Conditions Are Right (2020)

Northern poets have a feeling for ice

This is how it happens: 
you take in another’s
song in words
and certain notes
take hold; firm.

Why this one
and not that?

There’s a kinship that I love
coded in the mystery,
a treasury of shared conditioning
calling for release.

 And there’s a winding vein of river strung
out before our births.
And when we find the ringing notes,
trip the vibrant wire,

we walk on crystal water.



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Колокола и молоты | 
Hammers & Bells (2019)

Winner of Best Book of Poetry award at the 2019 Tarki-Tau Book Fair in Makhachkala, Dagestan, Russia.

An inter-cultural project initiated and coordinated by Zaira Makhacheva, this version of Hammers & Bells was translated into Russian by two award-winning Russian writers, Alisa Ganieva and Anastasia Strokina. This edition includes a literary analysis by Dagestan State University professor Firuza Abilova. Cover art is by Dagestan artist Asya Dzhabrailova.

Together, after several years of meticulous collaboration, they present the 2019 bilingual edition of Hammers & Bells as a lyric window on the expressive nature of two cultures’ languages.

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Hive (2017)

Pleasant words are as an honeycomb,
Sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.                         

Proverbs: 16-24 (KJV) 

“…finely spun, yet deeply wrought .. Randy Kohan has once again strung a suite of incantatory songs…”
Pierrette Requier, 6th Edmonton Poet Laureate, 2015 - 2017

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Rain of Naughts (2015)

“…is rapturous, with language both reverential and concise. Informed by history, landscape and the echo of some of Russia’s greatest poets – Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva – Rain of Naughts is a lyric cloudburst that signals a change in the weather of Canadian poetry.” 
Ekstasis Editions 

“Rain of Naughts is a prayer.  I read it in one breath, could not stop, felt my heart pulsing, almost Chekhovian.” 
Ella Zeltserman, Soviet-born, award-winning Edmonton poet

“…breath-stopping book of finely crafted poems…”
Pierrette Requier, 6th Edmonton Poet Laureate, 2015-2017

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Hammers & Bells (2013)

It takes all one’s strength
To bend one’s life
Into a single line

And hold it there.

A young boy stands beneath an air raid siren in the twentieth year of the Cold War.  The long cold persists, as does the engagement.  Hammers & Bells is subjective biography, a lyric response to life, drawing upon nature, human history and the poet-witnesses who found beauty in the depths of its apparent absence.  There is also a cross-current at work here – a blend of the carnal and the spiritual, something perhaps attributable to a uniquely Slavic perception of the world.

SPECIAL THANKS

A special thank you to Karl Skaret (karlskaret.com) the artist whose work adorns the covers of Rain of Naughts, Hive and An Image is a Place, to Dr. S. Aung, who is the artist of the cover art for Hammers & Bells (2013 edition), and to Asya Dzhabrailova, the artist behind the cover art for Hammers & Bells (2019).