For the Ukrainian-American poet, editor, and translator Boris Dralyuk, Hollywood is “a grand old dame reduced to dishabille, / her glory far too faded to restore.” Dralyuk sees the city from the perspective of immigrants and refugees, as the seat of exile and hope, connected by mythology and money to each of its surrounding communities. His individual poems may at first appear slight in their ambition, but they accumulate a vision and recover a history too few remember. With a verbal facility reminiscent at its best of Byron or Pushkin, Dralyuk writes often in received forms like the Onegin sonnet. He rhymes cleverly: “Pasadena” with “misdemeanors,” “demolished” with “polished,” “aloes” with “gallows.” His subjects are faded landmarks, artists one doesn’t expect to find in LA like Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, Arnold Schoenberg, or film stars of a bygone age. He writes with enthusiasm about diminished lives, and the result in this first collection of poems, My Hollywood, is a book of elegant realism, a worthy addition to the poetry of “Los Angeles.”
See also: BORIS DRALYUK.
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