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.
The When Conditions Are Right video book launch took place October 17, 2020 in a pre- recorded 40-minute format. Our event highlighted an inter-cultural project between Randy and Zaira Makhacheva, with Professors and Students from the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Dagestan State University, 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.
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
“…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
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.
A special thank you to Karl Skaret, who is the artist behind the cover art of Rain of Naughts and Hive, 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).
