NATALYA SUKHONOS: FOOD FOR THE SOUL — The David M. Katz Poetry Blog

The colors of Ukranian cooking—purple and blue and gold—gleam in A Stranger Home , a radiant new book of poems by Natalya Sukhonos. Much more than descriptions, these renderings of food become symbolic representations evocative of enduring relationships, suggestive of particular times and places. They can be seen as “a form of expression,” to appropriate a phrase from Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature “for an unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness.” Sukhonos’s culinary symbols vibrate in the eyes, nose, and mouth, and, especially, the mind.

“Tonight I cooked her purple potatoes, /and the water I drained /was purple-blue and still as a frozen lake,” the poet writes in “In failing light,” one of two poems reprinted below. In an apparent mother-daughter give-and-take, the mother “smothers” her portion of the daughter’s purple potatoes with heavily buttered purplish ramps, “adding salt and sunflower oil.” The scene is both delicious and anxiety provoking, symbolizing the sustaining and forever uneasy relations among the living and the dead.

The second poem, “Holodomor,” portrays images of sumptuous cuisine in the minds of the hungry. Explains Sukhonos in a footnote: “The title refers to the famine imposed by the Soviet Union on Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 with the purpose of exterminating Ukrainian people. Holodomor’s death toll exceed[ed] millions.” Here the thought of food is alluring to the reader but excruciating to Sidor, a character in the poem:

Father to eight, Sidor had to quell his hunger.

To avoid dreaming of golden

rings of fried potatoes, pearly

thin slices of bacon, the deep orange

sunset of borscht,

he ate handfuls

of salt.

Let me just say that I’m ravished by the phrase, “the deep orange/sunset of borscht.” Amid evocations of sublime sensual pleasure and hellish pain, these rich poems wind their way through taste buds and nerve endings, into twisting stomachs and limbs, and, ultimately, into our hearts.

In failing light

The ocean’s throat pulsing in that narrow cave

during my mother’s visit to San Francisco

Tonight I cooked her purple potatoes,

and the water I drained

was purple-blue and still as a frozen lake

The word for crying in Italian, piangere

evokes a plunge

My mother would smother potatoes

with ramps and butter, savoring every bite,

adding salt and sunflower oil

The water rushed towards us in that cave,

roaring with wind and hidden laughter,

bits of salt that would settle on our skin

like tiny blisters of light.

My mother had beautiful breasts.

She wore a blue silk scarf with iris flowers

to the Outer Sunset. The walk to the beach

was one of those Russian black lacquered wonders

with brilliant onion domes, doe-eyed horses and maidens,

the box spilling over with her stories and gossip

We huddled close because of the waves

the failing light that long day

the windy journey home

the warmth unspoken

in a conch shell we found

that would outlast my mother.

Poem “In falling light” from A Stranger Home, available from Moon Pie Press.

Holodomor

To my grandmother Alexandra Tishchenko of Poltava, Ukraine. She had survived famine and much more.

Father to eight, Sidor had to quell his hunger.

To avoid dreaming of golden

rings of fried potatoes, pearly

thin slices of bacon, the deep orange

sunset of borscht,

he ate handfuls

of salt. Thirsty, he went to the village river

to keep from seeing his children crawling

for crumbs on the earthen floor, his smallest

daughter calling out “Tato!” to distract herself

with bright scraps of fabric from his defunct tailor shop.

Sidor put handfuls of salt in his mouth.

What gave his every meal its flavor

kept him from ravaging his dinner

like a wolf going after his only cow.

Crystals growing deep

in the mountains

of the tales he told

migrated to his body at night

while children, wife, and hunger

slept unawares. Crystals of salt

twisted and bore through skin and muscle,

morphed into a monster winged and fluttering,

and landed in his kidneys.

After beating Sasha, his smallest daughter,

for losing the village school’s money,

Sidor told tall tales

better than mother. Fearing him,

Sasha still yearned for his voice,

stories that kept monsters at bay –

those glum unruly creatures twisting stomachs,

limbs, and hearts.

Poem “Holodomor” from A Stranger Home, available from Moon Pie Press.