The Brooklyn Rail

When Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky’s Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine was published in 2017, many US-based readers, including myself, were astonished not only by the intense, visceral subject matter of its poems, but by the rigor and range of the poets included therein. This revelation was, however, a symptom of Western-centric thinking. For nearly two hundred years, Ukraine has enjoyed a robust literature, if not our full attention. Since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, and Ukraine’s ensuing “Revolution of Dignity,” the inevitable Russo-Ukrainian war has been enacted upon the world stage and thus, like never before, entrenched historical divisions between the two nations are now centered in the global consciousness. One result of this in the US is an increased demand for Ukrainian literature translated into English. Poetry holds a premier position in Ukrainian culture. Through it, politics, community, and identity intersect in undeniably powerful ways. The poems amassed in Words for War make clear that nation’s poets have a deep sense of obligation to their people.

Indeed, one of Ukraine’s most accomplished poets, Ostap Slyvynsky, is also a poetry citizen par excellence, giving voice to people and points of view that might otherwise be erased through violence. (Not coincidentally, since 2021, he has also organized PEN Ukraine’s festival to feature novice and underappreciated writers.) His nine poems from Words for War exhibited an intriguing formal tension, sound historical awareness, and oblique yet deeply personal allusions. I, enthralled, eagerly waited for some American press to issue a full volume of translations.

I didn’t have to wait too long. In 2023, Lost Horse Press published Winter King, a bilingual edition of more than seventy-five Slyvynsky poems, approximately half of which are translated into English by Iryna Shuvalova, the rest rendered by Vitaly Chernetsky. The collection gathers all poems from the author’s most recent book (also called Winter King); selects generous portions from two previous volumes (Adam and Ball in the Darkness); and concludes with three new poems. The result is a substantive volume that should make Ostap Slyvynsky better known in this country.

If Slyvynsky’s abiding theme is Ukraine’s current war—and more specifically the material, physical, and psychological effects said war has exacted upon those living in the shadow of instability and violence—there is no overriding approach to this theme. Some poems emerge as testimonies recited by persons who welcome readers so directly into their confidences that a more general context is not always forthcoming. Others, guided by third-person narration, address personal struggles through comparative detachment. Still others speak from a collective voice, acting as a chorus for an entire community. “Stories” is particularly powerful because it blends all of those approaches into a single, three-part poem. In part one, an unnamed narrator recalls a moment from his youth when he and his friends tried to serve pigeons “coffee”—i.e., crushed brick mixed with water. When none of the birds taste the concoction, they call upon the youngest member of their group to do it. The boy consents without resistance, draining the cup inside him, even beyond the point of their expectations. The twist: “Only after drinking it all up, did he begin to cry.” This portion of “Stories” ends with the narrator admitting that, as an adult, he is “more ignorant / than back then. I watch a stone / fly towards me, / thrown from a misted-over shore.”

Part two of “Stories” combines documentary poetics with intimate lyric utterance. Someone, presumably Slyvynsky, records a mother’s testimony, allowing “half of her face to live on in the darkness” while doing so. By her admission, she and her child hid for four days in a bunker to avoid bombing. Her attempt to clarify the intensity of the experience leads to analogy, asking the man who records her to imagine “an evening where you go to sleep, / and turn off the light knowing that in the darkness, / the trees are blooming and the night birds are hunting.” Part three is more compressed and indirect. The narrator, again possibly the poet, apologizes to his bedmate for waking her with his singing. By way of explanation, he remembers himself as a boy who “tossed and turned in his bed” because he had fallen in love with the girl next door. In retaliation for feeling so vulnerable, he threw a stick of burning wood over the fence into the girl’s yard. While significant from a literal standpoint, this admission may also serve as a succinct allegory for “border” conflicts in moments of agitation. Each thematically-adjacent narrative from “Stories” captures a moment of witness crucial in itself; the sum total of those parts offers a more complex, panoramic perspective.

In general, Slyvynsky’s handling of testimony is markedly different from a better-known, though not necessarily stronger Ukrainian poet, Serhiy Zhadan, whose approach to the genre resembles Charles Reznikoff’s. Whereas Zhadan (and Reznikoff) extract moments of poetic power from unadorned, plainspoken utterance, Slyvynsky’s procedures engage other elements, such as classical allusion, received poetic forms, and exploitation of subtext. As a result, he places a great deal of pressure upon image and tone to suggest rather than state. Winter King is rich with such examples. Tensions are foregrounded, not resolved, and a frequent sense of menace percolates just beneath the surface of many poems from the collection. In “Junior,” for instance, a boy tells his father: “Someone came to see you. / He said next time he won’t come alone.”

Nonetheless, hope and resilience carry many of these speakers through their fears and traumas. Storytelling often serves as an effective antidote to suffering. In “Latifa,” a boy asks why he and his mother do not return home; their home, she explains, held so much love that it floated into the heavens. Other times, consolations may be starker, such as when language reframes a moment of brutality as poetry: “When we strike,” a collective voice explains in an untitled poem, “when we are killing each other— / the way only the closest kin can do— / through the curtain it looks like a dance.” History has shown that peace will not come easily to Ukraine. Nevertheless, its best poets like Slyvynsky are drawn, as another collective voice admits in “Something Always Shines in Front of US,” to some inexplicable, unnamable entity that sustains them, “for / sometimes there is no hope, but it is still within us.”