Children of Ararat
Reviews
This is a momentous collection rendered by a poet in his prime. Children of Ararat takes the reader on a harrowing journey beginning with the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and continuing on to the denial that lingers to this day. While the horror is made clear, there is something oddly joyful in the mourning, in the poet’s ability to give voice to the long-dead. Without hyperbole, the poet evokes the gruesome events and articulates how, as the inheritor of his father’s experiences, he finds himself ‘trapped in an abyss’ created nearly a century ago. As with his previous collection, Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems, Garebian once again creates a living elegy that at times reaches almost beyond words.
—Jeff Round, www.jeffreyround.com
It’s a passionate and angry collection of poems focusing on the massacre of ethnic Armenians in Turkey in June, 1915. …The book, though, is more than a catalogue of atrocities….the book opens with a selection of poems that reflect on his father’s story, ‘the whole mad history of it.’ Other poems explore the effects of the genocide on the survivors and on the descendants of victims. Garebian also comments on how the genocide has affected artists of Armenian descent and their works: the paintings of Arshile Gorky, the plays of William Saroyan, and the films of Atom Egoyan…The writing is evocative and full of powerful images. Sometimes, as Garebian describes, the whole landscape answered in pain: ‘Between the staked olive trees, the partridge/caught their spurs in wires/wrenching the skies with cries.’
—Quentin Mills-Fenn, Uptown Magazine, Winnipeg
If we put our ears to the ground, we will hear “death by wholesale subtraction,” we will hear the story of shoes lost and the sounds of shoes boiling. We will hear the powerful passionate voice of Keith Garebian who will not be silenced and whose tongue “licks the caves where the dead lie in hibernation.”
—Joy Kogawa
In Children of Ararat, Keith Garebian, relentlessly and with an optic heart, pursues the suffering of the victims, exposes historical hypocrisies, and pleads with the world to acknowledge the truth about that dark chapter in the lives of his people. The Armenian genocide has certainly stung Garebian into poetry. These poems are a splendid memorial which will continue to haunt the reader long after he has put them aside.
—Henry Beissel
Rage, for it to work on the page, requires a control so stern it seems like ease of phrase; historical pain made personal cannot be made convincing without such control and craft as is found in these poems by Keith Garebian.
—Barry Callaghan
If you want to feel how deeply a genocidal history can impact the imagination, read these brave, passionate, relentless and incandescent poems by Keith Garebian.
—Peter Balakian
Children of Ararat addresses the legacy of the Armenian genocide. A son shaped by his father’s experience serves as witness to the aftershocks of brutality. This poet is unafraid to face the horror that is too often the result of politics and too much the truth of history.
—Jury, Dektet 2010
