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The armed conflict in the east of Ukraine in 2017 brought about an emergence of a distinctive trend in contemporary Ukrainian poetry: the poetry of war.
Directly and indirectly, the poems collected in this volume engage with the events and experiences of war, reflecting on the themes of alienation, loss, dislocation, and disability; as well as justice, heroism, courage, resilience, generosity, and forgiveness.
In addressing these themes, the poems also raise questions about art, politics, citizenship, and moral responsibility. The anthology brings together some of the most compelling poetic voices from different regions of Ukraine. Young and old, female and male, somber and ironic, tragic and playful, filled with extraordinary terror and ordinary human delights, the voices recreate the human sounds of war in its tragic complexity.
Oksana Maksymchuk is an author of two award-winning books of poetry in the Ukrainian language, and a recipient of Richmond Lattimore and Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender translation prizes. She works on problems of cognition and motivation in Plato’s moral psychology. Maksymchuk teaches philosophy at the University of Arkansas.
Max Rosochinsky is a poet and translator from Simferopol, Crimea. His poems had been nominated for the PEN International New Voices Award in 2015. With Maksymchuk, he won first place in the 2014 Brodsky-Spender competition. His academic work focuses on twentieth century Russian poetry, especially Osip Mandelshtam and Marina Tsvetaeva.
Published by Academic Studies Press (Boston, MA) and Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (Cambridge, MA), Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine is available in hardback, paperback, and digital ebook formats.
New Poems from Ukraine by:
Anastasia Afanasieva
Vasyl Holoborodko
Borys Humenyuk
Yuri Izdryk
Aleksandr Kabanov
Kateryna Kalytko
Lyudmyla Khersonska
Boris Khersonsky
Marianna Kiyanovska
Halyna Kruk
Oksana Lutsyshyna
Vasyl Makhno
Marjana Savka
Ostap Slyvynsky
Lyuba Yakimchuk
Serhiy Zhadan
# new poetry
Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine
Edited by Oksana Maksymchuk & Max Rosochinsky
with an introduction by Ilya Kaminsky and an afterword by Polina Barskova
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Series: Ukrainian Studies
Pages: 242 pp.
16 illus. (color)
Publication Date: December 2017
English
ISBN: 9781618116666 (cloth) 32,99 euro
ISBN: 9781618118615 (paper) 24,99 euro
More information: https://www.wordsforwar.com/
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More in: #Modern Poetry Archive, #More Poetry Archives, *War Poetry Archive, - Book News, - Book Stories, Archive Y-Z, REPRESSION OF WRITERS, JOURNALISTS & ARTISTS, WAR & PEACE, Yakimchuk, Lyuba
we will walk back, even with bare feet
if we don’t find our home in the place where we left it
we will build another one in an apricot tree
out of luscious clouds, out of azure ether
Apricots of Donbas—by award-winning contemporary Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk—is the 7th book in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. As are previous volumes in the Series, it has been released in a dual-language edition.
Born and raised in a small coal-mining town in Ukraine’s industrial east, Yakimchuk lost her family home in 2014, when the region was occupied by Russian-backed militants, and her parents and sister were forced to flee as refugees.
Reflecting the complex emotional experiences of a civilian witnessing a gradual disintegration of her familiar surroundings, Yakimchuk’s poetry is versatile, ranging from sumptuous verses about the urgency of erotic desire in a war-torn city to imitations of child-like babbling about the tools and toys of military combat.
Playfulness in the face of catastrophe is a distinctive feature of Yakimchuk’s voice, evoking the legacy of the Ukrainian Futurists of the 1920s. The poems’ artfulness goes hand in hand with their authenticity, offering intimate glimpses into the story of a woman affected by a life-altering situation beyond her control.
(…)
my friends are hostages
and I can’t reach them, I can’t do netsk
to pull them out of the basements
from under the rubble
yet here you are, writing poems
ideally slick poems
high-minded gilded poems
beautiful as embroidery
there’s no poetry about war
just decomposition
only letters remain
and they all make a single sound — rrr
(…)
Lyuba Yakimchuk from Decomposition,
translated from the Ukrainian by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky
Lyuba Yakimchuk
is a poet, playwright, and screenwriter. Her two collections of poetry, Moda (2009) and Abrykosy Donbasu (2015) won prestigious awards, including the International Slavic Poetic Award (Ukraine) and the International Poetic Award of the Kovalev Foundation (USA). Since 2019, her play The Wall has been running at the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater, the largest in Ukraine. She also authored the script for the film The Slovo House: An Unfinished Novel, reflecting on the literary life in the 1930’s Kharkiv. Born and raised in a small town near Luhansk, Yakimchuk now lives in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Born and raised in a small coal-mining town in Ukraine’s industrial east, Yakimchuk lost her family home in 2014 when the region was occupied by Russian-backed militants and her parents and sister were forced to flee as refugees. Reflecting her complex emotional experiences, Yakimchuk’s poetry is versatile, ranging from sumptuous verses about the urgency of erotic desire in a war-torn city to imitations of childlike babbling about the tools and toys of military combat. Playfulness in the face of catastrophe is a distinctive feature of Yakimchuk’s voice, evoking the legacy of the Ukrainian Futurists of the 1920s. The poems’ artfulness go hand in hand with their authenticity, offering intimate glimpses into the story of a woman affected by a life-altering situation beyond her control.
# new poetry
APRICOTS OF DONBAS
poems by Lyuba Yakimchuk
Translated by Oksana Maksymchuk,
Max Rosochinsky & Svetlana Lavochkina
Oktober 2021
Paperback
166 pp
ISBN 978-1-7364323-1-0
Lost Horse Press
$30.00
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More in: #Modern Poetry Archive, - Book News, Archive Y-Z, Archive Y-Z, Art & Literature News, Yakimchuk, Lyuba
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