Alexander Zhitenyov. Jump into an Air River. Review of A. Manichenko’s book, and here’s about tenderness
One would like to be a person who speaks this way. Not because the speech is alluring, but because it is forthright. Here, poetry is a way to speak about the essential while remaining convincing. The reader’s joy lies in knowing that there is order in the world and that it can be created from a simple need for it: "and now with every right I am part / of that power able to bestow authority."
This book is both a debut and a selected work; it is both accidental and representative. This duality is explained by the nature of poetic speech, which strives to return to the subtext, to the situation of communication. Fragmentation and ellipsis are its most organic qualities, the formula "and here's" is their sign. For this reason, real interlocutors and circumstances are especially important here.
This is free speech, which is always appropriate, and therefore is not afraid to be naive or absurd, complex or dramatic. It has no fear of influence, as there are no fears at all. It is alien to all external evaluative templates, for which "a golden word is equivalent to / a wooden glassy empty one." It is interested in the impossible – the "physis" arranged by people.
<...>
Tenderness remains even in an unread letter. But among the things that are greater and longer-lasting than people are not only strong feelings. The word – vulnerable, fading, incorporeal – also remains – "maybe not for us and not for me / even not for us and not for me." This conviction is an exciting lyrical piece of news that one wants to ponder and to return to.