‘My Hollywood and Other Poems’
By Boris Dralyuk
Paul Dry Books, 69 pages

Hollywood has always been the home of exiles. Is anyone on Sunset Boulevard not a displaced person?

I knew a biographer, Carol Easton, who had grown up in Hollywood, but as soon as she decided to write a biography of Sam Goldwyn, his studio and the minions she wanted to interview clammed up and treated her as though she did not belong on the lot.

Then there are figures like Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley, who populate Boris Dralyuk’s “Stravinsky in the Farmers Market,” a poem laden with so many allusions to historic Hollywood places and people that it is a veritable T.S. Eliot “Wasteland,” one that I have the urge to annotate with footnotes.

To write a biography of anyone who comes to Hollywood, sooner or later it becomes a biblical quest, so I wasn’t surprised to find in “Jonah” that Hollywood is the whale, in which the poet loses “track of time” in the slimy, hellish fish’s belly, and though he hasn’t “written anything in a year,” he suddenly finds in the “rhythm of the tide” that he can offer up a “little psalm.”

“My Hollywood” evokes an overwhelming sense of estrangement in a foreign element that so flummoxed Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and many other writers during stints at the studios. Generations of arrivals from abroad discovered a different, changing Hollywood, and yet one that remains the same in Mr. Dralyuk’s allusions to the Egyptian Theater and the Chateau Marmont, where Maureen Stapleton holed up while fending off my phone calls so as not to talk about Marilyn Monroe.

Mr. Drayluk, editor in chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and one of those belated Hollywood arrivals, dedicates his book: “for my mother, who brought me to Hollywood” — from Ukraine. He has taught at UCLA, the University of Tulsa, and the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

Mr. Dralyuk has been around and brings to his Hollywood poems a keen sense of the souls who have submitted to the tawdry and yet tempting memories of the “women in black” who “shed tears for Valentino.” Even though, in “Aspiration,” “The Sheik sinks deep into the dunes of time,” Hollywood has provided a vocabulary for loss that leads to the poem’s vision of a crow that “clacks in the branches overhead, / like a projector slowly going dead.” This poet is not to be outdone in his employment of the finality of rhyme.

This book is divided into “My Hollywood,” “Absentee Ballet,” “Russian Hollywood: Translations,” “Late Style,” so that autobiography, biography, history, and translation collide and coincide, and Mr. Dralyuk becomes the fodder of Hollywood that has hooked his imagination.

“The Catch: On Translation” is both what the poet catches and what has caught him: “I draw you out, faint voice, from rippled pages / a famished angler reeling in a fish.” The tricky art of translation applies both to the foreigner’s effort to succeed in Hollywood and the translator’s ambition to snag his prey in the “taught line of attention,” imperiled by the “currents and the wind.”

Hollywood is not mentioned in “The Catch,” yet what else are we to think of a place that is like the “folktale” in the poem granting “a wish—a golden thing, imbued with living magic,” which Faulkner wryly evoked in his story, “Golden Land.” Hollywood is the evanescent promise always decaying in these poems.

Mr. Dralyuk’s poetry has been compared to Edward Hopper’s paintings.  Haunting scenes of the Hollywood Russian diaspora also include every Jonah of whatever stripe who arrives in the Garden of Allah hotel, a pilgrim in a strange land that housed stars like Alla Nazimova and Ronald Reagan. While there in the company of misfits, history and biography were made and now fade, only to be remembered in the paradoxical “Lethe,” the last poem in Mr. Drayluk’s book: “Nothing was ever / quite the same. / Everyone came to be another.” His poems are like the river this poem evokes, “the river I / will never recover.”

Mr. Rollyson’s biographies include “Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress,” “Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews,” “A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan,” and the forthcoming “Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero.”