Quarters, other small coins, darkness, and happiness in Ilya Kaminsky's "Dancing in Odessa"

In his poem "Praise", from the 2004 collection "Dancing in Odessa", Ilya Kaminsky plays with the image of a relative who arrives to surprise children with a magic trick: "The darkness, a magician, finds quarters // behind our ears." Here, the personification of darkness, otherwise a figure of fear or anxiety, turns it into the small gift of the comedy and nostalgia of a childhood memory. The link between coins and a noun with "-ness" echoes an earlier moment in the book, from "American Tourist": "happiness // is money, yes, but only the smallest coins." The quarters and other small coins figure the happiness drawn out of darkness in Kaminsky's poems. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 3 January 2023)