One line into “Decoding the Hill of Dead Kings,” something felt missing.
Of course, it’s difficult to identify tone when you’re just 14 words into a collection of 52 poems, but the opening remark — “Have you ever lost a country? The Armenians have / three times / in 108 years” — feels strangely tongue in cheek for a work otherwise taking itself deadly seriously.
In his debut poetry collection, Alex Vartan Gubbins, a lecturer at the American University of Armenia, sweeps the reader through mythological landscapes of his homeland. After the oddly sarcastic first page, each poem is an evocative journey through a sprawling geography of longing. But the collection refuses to allow those poems to exist without grandiose rhetorical significance — preventing them from truly feeling complete.
Gubbins often laments the cultural erosion of regions and traditions both inside and outside of Armenia, plunging into the raw emotion of visiting a place that has been through so much ruin. He builds this feeling by chronicling the mythic in the mundane, creating a world whose everyday practices feel commonplace to its occupants but harrowing to the reader. The zoomed-in fragments of religion and ritual feel tainted and hidden from view, and by writing them into existence, the author ‘decodes’ and summons them back to the spotlight.
Much of the symbolism revolves around primordial elements. Rivers and natural landmarks are imbibed with a sinking feeling — the lack of conscious control over the happenings of the land around us. The recurring presence of the Armenian water goddess Astghik only deepens the sense of human helplessness.
Fire, in juxtaposition, is treated in a Promethean capacity — a simultaneous source of wonder and promise of destruction. Flames often appear in intimate moments, giving the impression that the speaker is both afraid of their violent undertones and fascinated by them. This lightens the mood from sulking to longing, which makes these lines feel cozy and more compelling.
Some of the collection’s strongest segments are grounded in the human struggle for belonging amid a familiar yet unforgiving landscape. Diction is often more visceral than musical, but still produces lines of breathtaking lyric. In “Loving Tolstoy in Yerevan,” the moment after a sexual encounter is transformed into a command to “learn about the suns and phantasmal sun dogs, why the clouds like today / heave a flood against our window.”
Gubbins’ ability to imbibe an unassuming moment with the weight of past and future suffering is nothing short of breathtaking. But it’s difficult to escape the tonal dissonance of the opening “Declaration,” primarily because its sentiments are recycled across the entire collection.
Even if we are unfamiliar with the minutiae of the region, we have already been situated in the general time period and setting on the very first page — and it’s difficult to experience Gubbins’ verse without remembering its preachy, argumentative essay-like introduction. We are fed continuous reminders of it anyway, in a fashion that interferes with the intimacy of the collection’s most powerful moments.
When these moments are synthesized into rhetoric, Gubbins’ themes become too bloated to hold the reader’s attention. This forced cohesiveness is most prevalent in “Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh/Khachen,” a 5-page narrative piece that begins splendidly but gets frustratingly sidetracked.
The poem’s second section places us among wartime posters in a hotel kitchen, sweeping through Soviet-era flyers and the emotions of the people depicted in them. But the thought-provoking description soon devolves into a didactic sequence of similes. The land also looks like the post-war land of the 1990s, the 1920s, the land from 1915 specifically. Oh, and don’t forget the land from the 1890s as well. The beautifully chosen diction has been dulled, surrounded by a grocery list of historical wrongdoings.
Eventually, the stanza’s pacing and punctuation is entirely stripped as it trails off into a stream of consciousness about the land, which pedantically spoon-feeds you social commentary rather than allowing the reader to infer it from the text itself.
That isn’t to say these words aren’t important. Unearthing sidelined injustices and bringing them to the forefront is still incredibly powerful — but it’s a jarring disconnect that denies the lyricism of the previous moment room to breathe.
This is where the ambitious scope of “Decoding the Hill of Dead Kings” fails: when it awkwardly forces specific historical context into lines that already allude to it.
Instead, the collection shines in sequences that aren’t so contrived. Near the back end of the work, “Sauna & Results” is followed by three single-paragraph poems that transport the reader into a semi-illusory homeland. It’s packed with pensive imagery, as the speaker pines for a world where inhabitants can flourish in spite of a blemished physical environment, or perhaps because of it.
But the ethereal beauty is broken in the next poem by a sudden, vague declaration that “grandparents do not understand / even if they say they do.”
If Gubbins didn’t possess such a compelling poetic voice, the collection’s wide range of aims wouldn’t feel so disjointed. But when his individual lines are continuously interrupted by explanations of their rhetorical significance, it’s difficult to fully appreciate their quality.
“Decoding the Hill of Dead Kings” is filled with mesmerizing lyric poems that touch upon the past without calling it out by name. But it doesn’t trust those pieces to speak for themselves — leaving the reader wondering if they needed decoding at all.
Daily Arts Contributor Jaxson Kaplan-Rudolph can be reached at jaxsonkr@umich.edu.
