AN APPRECIATION OF TATYANA APRAKSINA’S CALIFORNIA PSALMS

Olga Romanova. St. Petersburg, Russia, 2023.

The imagery in Tatyana Apraksina’s California Psalms is stunning in its depth and precision. These are essentially pictures painted with words. When you read these poems, you visualize intensely. Here you see a raging ocean, and here a canyon, a forest, a small hut withstanding the weather, a road. And among all this — no, in the center of it all — stands the author, a fragile woman with her arms outstretched, trying to understand the surrounding elements and to let them pass through her. The author’s microcosm becomes part of the macrocosm. Everything outside her becomes her, and this reveals the great secret and truth of the unity of the world and God, its creator. The author sees the divine principle in everything: in nature, in music, in the poems of a poet who lived before her, and even in everyday objects like an ordinary table, which, if you look closely, holds entire stories of human lives. We don’t think about such things, but household items, furniture and clothing hold memories of the events, conversations and experiences of our lives. Maybe that’s why it’s sometimes difficult for us to part with them.

     The author also has a keen sense of music. The power of the ocean, bright stars in the vast sky and simultaneously the tenderness and fragility of a flower — in the art of the fugue, in a musical accompaniment for Mass. There’s the riotousness of life, but also the reminder of death, of this world’s limits, in the sequence Dies Irae.

     The Psalms must be read in full; they are a single, complete cycle. They contain no unnecessary touches, but no understatements, either. And this likely appeals to me, a person who seeks order and understanding. I find satisfaction in the work’s completeness, in the author’s closure of her circle. The Psalms have no “fog,” no halftones requiring conjecture (although sometimes such works are also interesting to read); the author expresses her inner feelings and experiences extremely clearly. And that encourages the reader’s empathy and engagement in the author’s reality.

     Undoubtedly, these poem-pictures help with rising to a new level, with a growing perception of the world as a single whole. In reading this “twine-knot message,” you become part of a “full orchestra rising to a new range, a new height in continuing performance.”

Translated by James Manteith