Shadow Traffic (review)

One of our greatest sins is how far we've pushed our needed stories into dark. This may be a consequence of the easy road that sponsored—commercial—narratives travel. Or it may be out of our preferences for circuses over bread. What will you find in Shadow Traffic? On the road surface you will find—to exploit the metaphor—a good bit of roadkill: the detritus of human cruelties from which it is difficult to look away. At the same time, as on a roadway, one feels a sense of relief at being able to simply travel onward, at being able to turn the page past the horrors of the reader's present. But the next pages don't always let you escape. There is an episodic or cyclic revisiting of the functionality of recall. Gyre-like in its returns, one moves among poems and stories as if one had suddenly to give in to the impulse one feels walking the streets of a city: talk to each person in turn; become involved in every successive story; become entitled to the mind and memory of each next self. It is, honestly, a series of intimacies from which might feel like shrinking. Reading Shadow Traffic is an endurance of intensity. Why do it? Because Marc Kaminsky has produced a collection of prose and poetic narratives that rescue memories both up to and beyond the level of poignancy. One of his characters says, "If I'm a closed book, my father is a book whose pages will not have been written." The questions of heritage, of lineage, of influence, abound.

In a section titled "Walls of the Ghetto," there is a lengthy poem called "The Walls." It consists of six numbered sections, beginning with quatrains, progressing to single stanzas in the later numbered sections. The speaker narrates the memories of figures which ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Kishinev and/ Vilna rolled through My Lai." The resultant evident journey into the ghetto and, apparently, among the later minds of protest and survival, covers nations and mentalities until one understands "The Walls" as the individual consciousness that must contain ever more disparate functionalities of memory: what to conserve in this house of horrors that leaves myriad precious tools and an indifferent world? The poem concludes: "And still we/ haven't burned through/ the history that charged us/ with a task too big/ for any of us alone." To that end, this volume is a contribution to that over-large task. And one's reading of Shadow Traffic constitutes sharing the load. There are in this volume, as well, plenty of poems that pay one for the labor. Consider among these "Ruakh," which can be translated as breath/spirit/wind. Thirteen lines in two stanzas, this poem rescues transience by a savoring of experience in the moment of a breath, a zephyr.

Kaminsky moves the reader among characters with a cultural and literary self-consciousness that sometimes goes an easy step too far. Culturally, the narratives favor twentieth-century Jewish history, from Europe and crossing, both with and without survivors, to America. "I wander through alleys of the shadow of death …," he says in his introduction, titled "A Room in the Diaspora." But, as if anticipating the critique of the tightly bound and permeating issue of narrow focus, Kaminsky absolves himself by declaring: "The pieces collected here came unbidden." The title of this volume is taken from what Northeasterners recognize as a radio station's roadway segment. And, in the sense that we are all fellow travelers, Kaminsky is asking readers to recognize the basic realm through which we move: to shadow the traffic of human experience, of memory, of shadowing as an act of following that permits conservation.

There are here the overwhelming details of seriousness—the stainless impertinence of the tombs of emotional memory. What joy is here comes consequentially; one treasures one's survival simply by comparison. Reading Shadow Traffic is engaging when one is having one...