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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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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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Born in New Zealand in 1934, Fleur Adcock spent the war years in England, returning with her family to New Zealand in 1947.
She emigrated to Britain in 1963, working as a librarian in London until 1979. In 1977-78 Fleur Adcock was writer-in-residence at Charlotte Mason College of Education, Ambleside.
Fleur Adcock was Northern Arts Literary Fellow in 1979-81, living in Newcastle, becoming a freelance writer after her return to London.
She received an OBE in 1996, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006 for Poems 1960-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2000).
Fleur Adcock published three pamphlets with Bloodaxe: Below Loughrigg (1979), Hotspur (1986) and Meeting the Comet (1988), as well as her translations of medieval Latin lyrics, The Virgin & the Nightingale (1983).
She also published two translations of Romanian poets with Oxford University Press, Orient Express by Grete Tartler (1989) and Letters from Darkness by Daniela Crasnaru (1994).
All her other collections were published by Oxford University Press until they shut down their poetry list in 1999, after which Bloodaxe published her collected poems Poems 1960-2000 (2000), followed by Dragon Talk (2010), Glass Wings (2013), The Land Ballot (2015) and Hoard (2017).
The Mermaid’s Purse is due from Bloodaxe in 2021. Poems 1960-2000 and Hoard are Poetry Book Society Special Commendations while Glass Wings is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In October 2019 Fleur Adcock was presented with the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry 2019 by the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern.
Fleur Adcock writes about men and women, childhood, identity, roots and rootlessness, memory and loss, animals and dreams, as well as our interactions with nature and place. Her poised, ironic poems are remarkable for their wry wit, conversational tone and psychological insight, unmasking the deceptions of love or unravelling family lives.
Fleur Adcock began writing the poems in this book when she was 82. The two chief settings are New Zealand, with its multi-coloured seas, and Britain, seen in various decades.
There are foreign travels, flirtations, family memories, deaths and conversations with the dead. Katherine Mansfield, incognito, dodges an academic conference; there’s a lesson in water divining as well as a rather unusual Christmas party.
We meet several varieties of small mammal, numerous birds, doomed or otherwise, and some sheep. The book ends with a sequence in memory of her friend, the poet Roy Fisher.
# new poetry
The Mermaid’s Purse
by Fleur Adcock
Publication Date : 25 Feb 2021
Pages: 80
Size: 234 x 156mm
ISBN: 9781780375700
Paperback
£10.99
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Notitie,
gevonden in een conservatorium
Ik weet wel dat mijn stiltes pijnlijk zijn,
vandaar dat ik niet ieder stuk nog speel.
Een rust in mijn 4’33” wordt niet zelden
ook de doorgewinterd luisteraar te veel.
Paul Bezembinder
Notitie, gevonden in een conservatorium
Gedicht
(Meer over Paul Bezembinder is te vinden op zijn website: www.paulbezembinder.nl)
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Rondeel
Zong ik mijn lief een liedekijn,
ik koos een mooie, zware brom,
ik zong van jeugd en ouderdom,
en dat het fijn voor ons zou zijn.
Van cocktails en van ambrozijn,
van slapen saam en kerels stom
zong ik mijn lief een liedekijn –
ik koos een mooie, zware brom.
Van instrument, muziek, refrein,
van slagwerk en van stille trom,
van ochtendlicht en ouderdom
zong ik een liedje klein en fijn,
zong ik mijn lief een liedekijn.
Paul Bezembinder
Rondeel
Gedicht
(Meer over Paul Bezembinder is te vinden op zijn website: www.paulbezembinder.nl)
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Dichterschap
Hij gaf verdwenen talen. Aan een school
in Rotterdam. Daaruit ontstond misschien
die diepe eenzaamheid die in hem school,
de angst dat iemand hem zou willen zien
om wie hij was, – om wie hij had te zijn,
een fluisteraar van oude stemmen zacht
die zich in peppels om de woning klein
verstopten voor de stiltes van de nacht.
Paul Bezembinder
Dichterschap
Gedicht
Foto: J.H. Leopold (1865 – 1925)
Paul Bezembinder studeerde theoretische natuurkunde in Nijmegen. In zijn poëzie zoekt hij vooral in klassieke versvormen en thema’s naar de balans tussen serieuze poëzie, pastiche en smartlap. Zijn gedichten en vertalingen (Russisch-Nederlands) verschenen in verschillende (online) literaire tijdschriften. Bundels: Kwatrijnen (Fantom E-books, 2018), Gedichten (2020, heruitgave), Parkzicht (2020). Meer voorbeelden van zijn werk vindt u op: www.paulbezembinder.nl.
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A timeless, visionary collection of poems from one of China’s most acclaimed poets-now available in English for the first time in a generation and featuring a foreword by his son, contemporary artist and activist Ai Weiwei
One of the most influential poets in Chinese history, Ai Qing is mostly unknown to Western readers, but his work has shaped the nature of poetry in China for decades. Born between the fall of imperial Manchurian rule and the establishment of the Communist People’s Republic, Ai Qing was at one time an intimate of Mao Zedong.
He would eventually fall out with the leader and be sentenced to hard labor during the Cultural Revolution, when he was exiled to the remote part of the country known as “Little Siberia” with his family, including his son, Ai Weiwei.
In his work, Ai Qing tells the story of a China convulsing in change, leaving behind a legacy of feudalism and imperialism but uncertain what the future will hold. Breaking with traditional forms of Chinese poetry, Ai Qing innovatively adapted free verse, writing with a simple sincerity in clear lines that could be understood by everyday readers.
Selected Poems of Ai Qing is an extraordinary collection that traces the powerful inner life of this influential poet who crafted poems of protest, who longed for a newer, happier age, and who wrote with a profound lyricism that reaches deep into the heart of the reader.
Selected Poems by Ai Qing (Author),
Ai Weiwei (Introduction), Robert Dorsett (Translator)
Ai Qing is regarded as one of the finest modern Chinese poets, whose free verse was influential in the development of new poetry in China.
Ai Weiwei is one of the world’s most important living artists. Born in 1957, he lives in Cambridge, UK.
Allan H. Barr is the author of a study in Chinese of a literary inquisition in the early Qing dynasty, Jiangnan yijie: Qing ren bixia de Zhuangshi shi’an, and the translator of several books by contemporary Chinese authors, including Yu Hua’s China in Ten Words and Han Han’s This Generation. He teaches Chinese at Pomona College in California.
# new poetry
Selected Poems by Ai Qing (Author),
Ai Weiwei (Introduction),
Robert Dorsett (Translator)
Publisher: Vintage Classics
2 Nov. 2021
Language: English
Hardcover
128 pages
ISBN-10: 1784877662
ISBN-13: 978-1784877668
£12.99
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Weerwil
Macht kan harde dingen maar is zo zacht
als spek wanneer het er op aankomt. Ogen
in de rug moeten open blijven want achter
de hoek dralen ongeduldige messendragers.
Grof als de krachtige streken van Permeke
zijn hun bedoelingen. Ze zwijgen instemmend,
zwaar als leugens die nooit ontmaskerd werden.
Bert Bevers
Weerwil
(Uit: Andere taal, Litera Este, Borgerhout, 2010)
Bert Bevers is dichter en schrijver.
Hij woont en werkt in Antwerpen (Be).
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Delight
I’ve been delighting in your face
since the Eureka mess of our embrace,
the cork of fizzing kissing taken place,
the sexual notation of blushing staves,
a lust-compass flashing up radar blips.
Sloppy corners, edges in melted clips
of our manic laughter, on risky ships,
in the city’s darkness and muddy trips,
naked tangles on private sandy strips,
isolated scrub lands and forest bits,
disused canal tunnel with freezing tits,
stopping the car in shadowy lay-bys,
alleyways, echoing blissed-out cries,
she delighted, ripping open my flies.
And through our lustiness a miracle came,
the pneumatic forces created the near-same,
through the acrobatic propagated struggle
in the hospital you pushed out of the bubble
when we saw you delight in your life force.
Now we are celebrating the main course
of us all together, as a loving source,
of the wonderful blended mix,
of our delight, our scented lives transfixed
we have built the home as well as the bricks.
Vincent Berquez
Delight
Vincent Berquez is a London–based artist and poet. He has published in Britain, Europe, America and New Zealand. His work is in many anthologies, collections and magazines worldwide (f.i. fleursdumal.nl).
# new book of poetry by Vincent Berquez:
The Sound of Blossom Falling
Author: Vincent Berquez
Paperback
Language: English
86 pages
Publisher: Cyberwit.net
2021
ISBN-10: 9390601096
ISBN-13: 978-9390601097
£10.89
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Rimpels
We lijken alleen zo oud. Het is de lichtval maar.
Want, gedraaid, kijk: nu zijn we weer gladjong.
Als toen we de simpele hoop uitspraken later
samen te mogen rimpelen. Die speling in en van
rechtmatig verleden. We wachtten brave jaren
op tijdgenoten, maar die bleken er al lang te zijn.
Bert Bevers
Rimpels
(Ongepubliceerd)
Bert Bevers is dichter en schrijver.
Hij woont en werkt in Antwerpen (Be).
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Dancing into
the cream of the night
You said take me dancing
in the cream of the night
like we did that time
when the music was jasper Spanish.
The seated flamenco women clapped
out the velocity of chattering rhythms
pushing the black and scarlet music
to the edge of our half-conscious world,
exciting the bloody pump with the drum
of temptation that agitated our lustiness.
The partnership of limbs tangled
loquacious, heady, demanding.
We took to the slippery dance floor
where I held the spine of your wet skin
in the stretch of my flexed palm –
you said your heart needed to dance with me
until the silver slit cracked into the shock
of the smoky grey marbled morning.
In charged anarchy, we succumbed
to fog drunkenly and lost ourselves till then.
Vincent Berquez
Dancing into the cream of the night
# Vincent Berquez is a London–based artist and poet. He has published in Britain, Europe, America and New Zealand. His work is in many anthologies, collections and magazines worldwide (f.i. fleursdumal.nl).
# new book of poetry by Vincent Berquez:
The Sound of Blossom Falling
Author: Vincent Berquez
Paperback
Language: English
86 pages
Publisher: Cyberwit.net
2021
ISBN-10: 9390601096
ISBN-13: 978-9390601097
£10.89
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, Archive A-B, Art & Literature News, Berquez, Vincent, Vincent Berquez
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