It is Djanikian's sense of precision about distances, his awareness, his awareness of the riskiness of engaging nostalgia, his willingness to step beyond cleverness, which makes his new book so valuable.

It is Djanikian's sense of precision about distances, his awareness, his awareness of the riskiness of engaging nostalgia, his willingness to step beyond cleverness, which makes his new book so valuable.

Gregory Djanikian's So I Will Till the Ground, his fifth collection of poetry, confronts the horrors of the Armenian genocide of 1915, and the diaspora that ensued, sending survivors to all parts of the world. By turns sorrowful and redemptive, the poems go on to record the author's boyhood in Egypt, and his eventual emigration to the United States and into a wholly different dulture, and a life, however new, lived always under the haunting shadow of the 1915 cataclysm. -These are poems,- Peter Balakian has written, that -chart . . . nothing less than a modern epic trajectory- whose...