Silvertone

by Dzvinia Orlowsky

These poems both celebrate and question the psychological existence we give to the objects that define our the silver spoon from which the speaker sips, during each Epiphany, the sacred Borscht which she later catches her mother, after guests have left, pouring down the drain; the acoustic guitar on which the speaker’s father strums his minor-keyed songs from Ukraine; or the granite bust of a national poet that, in the hot sun, fails to inspire. With heart and humor the speaker examines what stays, goes, and how every object, once illuminated by the past, has the ability to take on new meaning. Or, as Miles Davis put it, “I’ll play it first then tell you what it is later.”

80 pages, Paperback

First published February 12, 2013

About the author

Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Pushcart prize poet, translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books, and an author of six poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, including Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. Her translation from the Ukrainian of Alexander Dovzhenko’s novella, The Enchanted Desna, was published by House Between Water Press in 2006, and in 2014, Dialogos published Jeff Friedman’s and her co-translation of Memorials: A Selection by Polish poet Mieczslaw Jastrun for which she and Friedman were awarded a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship.