BELARUSIAN WHALES

The title of Anastasiya Kuzmicheva’s work “Belarusian Whales” invites readers into a world of contradictions and doubts. Indeed, while reading these verses one grasps the apparently conflicting depths of the author’s own point of view - thanks to a wide and clever usage of poetic figures. As such, her sky is “always without make-up“, while her brain “will wipe the dream like dust”. Meanwhile, warmth, light, shame, and love, are created through the imagery surrounding a “white temple” ….. an antithesis to previous assertions. Overall, this poet’s irony seems to be both subtle and comical, since one encounters lines like: “a whale escaped like all men” as a clear critique of average truth claims. Hence, those parts of the poem devoted to meaningful answers and pithy solutions remains the largest section of the entire composition. Albeit quickly followed by more questions. Curiously, neither “who”, nor “what” the whales represent is ever outlined. Instead, a sense of intelligent mystery points to “the names of chapters” as our only clue. After all, we already know that “ …everyone saw the whale…”, which leaves each reader to make up his, or her, own mind in this regard.

— Nadezhda Kolesnikova, writer