“a book is the song / of the body”: Michael Collins Reads Arthur Kayzakian’s Poetry Collection The Book of Redacted Paintings

Behind Arthur Kayzakian’s debut collection, The Book of Redacted Paintings, lies an unwritten history involving the speaker’s father, who was disappeared in the Iranian Revolution. The collection, the inaugural Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series Selection, ostensibly centers around the speaker’s efforts to recover a stolen portrait of his father, the painting itself accruing gravity to itself like the “black holes swirling in my father’s smile,” increasingly invoking vanished and vanishing life per se. Its graphic use of disappearing or obscured text in some pieces evokes the psychological dynamics of erasure in both mind and world, its perceptible wakes moving through relationships, illusions, addictions, even artistic creation. The speaker continually seeks paradoxical grounding in engaging psyche around the contours of what vanishes, even as the lacuna moves through consciousness and the world like a collapsing of association, a negative transcendence, a prion disease, a unilateral ideology.

The speaker’s necessary embrace of paradox in memory is facilitated by the dynamic conflict and cooperation between lyric and narrative modes. The first gesture toward vanishing occurs in the speaker’s childhood memory of kissing his father: “his smile, / glazed with the scent of smoke and bravado, // softened.” While the narrative sequences events, a lyric element in the opening from persona to presence moves through time in both the present speaker’s and future reader’s experience of the child’s glimpse of love, as sustaining as ephemeral. This known sensation of love that “not even silence has a name for” is one source of all the succor and suffering that follow.

“Rain” creates a similar duality, also incorporating a shift of perspective. First, the speaker senses that his father “can hear his children kicking // laughter in and out of him,” welcoming impressions of them into his interiority as they play in puddles. The speaker then intuits a reply, also across time, arising from a similar space of his father’s within himself: “Fifteen years later, / rain beats out a puddle in the shape of his body.” The lyric moment again emerges from the narrative frame at a point where felt overlaps in consciousness leap associatively across time.

These psychologically dynamic scenes provide emotional access for any of us who have experienced the internal paradox of the felt presence of loved ones no longer at hand. “Reading with My Father” explores similarities between such experiences of the loved ones within us and the mysteries of reading: “a book is the song / of the body.” Again, the father’s wisdom arises from indicative behavior: “My father, after reading to me each night, / loved to shut his door, turn off the lights // and sing to himself.” The father is at once loving, reverent, and aesthetically aware; one explanation for the obsession with the portrait is that it is an aesthetic reflection of a beautiful soul introjected into the speaker, intuitively seeking reflection in an also murderous world.

Other poems explore worldly connections to the speaker’s impression that his father “read as if the inside of a rock is made of dreams.” This may be read as a metaphorical skull, housing the brain where dreams occur. However, a dreamer watches or experiences dreams in their own worlds, experienced as enclosing the dreamer within their reality. The dreams and the physical reality of the dreamer are inter-contextual. This contradicts authoritarian views attempting to subjugate all to their own hardened perspectives.

“Dear Invader” addresses those who harbor such illusions through the actions that result from having literally “swallowed your faith,” as the spoils of lives they harmed: “That indigestion is your stomach acid / eating at your prayers.” Dissociated from psychological awareness, they only understand consequences communicated in matter. The speaker remains dually conscious: both understanding the Invader’s violation of their own interiority and their dangerous will for continued worldly violence:

All because we know you’ve lost everything
you love.

That hole inside you, the size of a bomb
you carry around like a heavy
bag of ghosts.

The “rock” and the “dreams”—correlated on one level with the Invader and the poet who sees through their pathology—remain inextricably related, each compelled and troubled by their connection to the other. Another view of such intertwined understandings emerges in “Therapy”:

she prescribes me pills and breathing mantrasanything
to keep me from falling through the paintings in my head

before we go she asks what is your relationship with night
letters written in exilei saymy executed friends

The paintings appear as symptoms, treated without healing the underlying trauma. The “paintings” may arise from traumatic events or longing for lost loved ones, or the conflict between them, each seeming dream-like within the context of the other. Here, the speaker’s seemingly impossible search for the painting seems linked with the ongoing struggle for a psychological flexibility that incorporates both realities. Poems that bear psychologically self-aware witness to historical atrocities allow both realities to inter-contextualize. This is one considerable complexity and virtue of this collection.

One practice for art to form healing connections between the internal and external becomes apparent in “Father and Son on a Bridge.” The poem introduces a photograph in which

a father and son throw stones
naked trees in a bone-contorted winter
twist their branches upward
and lean over them like a frozen prayer
on the son’s lips the words are hard
but we cannot know what is said
what we see is the lake’s stillness
and the reflection of uncovered branches
blooming in the underworld of the photograph

Hardness is ascribed to both frozen branches and prayer, an interior aspect of the son known only in material expressions that it is not, like art. This Mӧbius loop between interiors and exteriors continues: “he is the weight of shame I carry / and yet what is far inside him / stands beside me throwing stones.” The lines compare the father, remembered in an image authentic to his interiority, with the son’s difficulty in presenting his own complicated feelings about his loss. This conflict is addressed in the poem’s conclusion, in which the speaker ponders removing from the photograph “the lake” that “contains the reflection / of an upside-down world”:

what if we removed the lake
nothing to mirror or root
we’d have here an image of nature
without the adversity beneath it

Of course, removing the lake would not remove the reflection of the camera. Nor, we readers are grateful, does it actually remove the speaker’s self-reflective consciousness, which has given rise to so many poems that perceive external realities in confluence with and refracted through the tenderness and loss its own interiority.

The expression of the wish to be unreflective, though, represents an integration of the shadow content represented by the invader, an ongoing process in the poems. The opposite of erasure, after all, isn’t merely artistic embodiments; it is the self-reflection, compassion, and sense of aesthetic complexity needed to produce them, traits instilled by the father’s example. Nor are negated historical voices truly countered by an opposing form of eternal truth, but by continual presence with one’s own shadows and fragmentation. These fragments form a fascinating book, leaving plenty of empty space in which each of us may find pieces of ourselves, connections within the openings in our histories.

The Book of Redacted Paintings, by Arthur Kayzakian. Mount Vernon, New York: Black Lawrence Press, May 2023. 90 pages. $16.95, paper.

Michael Collins’ poems and book reviews have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines. He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing When People Cut Off Your Head and Leave It Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala, and the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances, which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews. He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and has taught at The Hudson Valley Writer’s Center, The Bowery Poetry Club, and several community outreach and children’s centers in Westchester. He is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY.

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