A Flight Over the Black Sea

I understand that Ihor Pavlyuk is from Polissya. The name of this region sounds magical to my ear. I have never visited such a place as Polissya... I think that Ihor Pavlyuk is a good poet and in his heart he resembles the unique natural spirit of his birthplace. My first impression from these English translations of Ihor Pavlyuk?s poems was that I was reading Seamus Heaney?s book. I am grateful to Ihor Pavlyuk for the energy of true humanity which I found in his poems. I know that a nebulous terrain exists in the hearts and minds of every person, a terrain that cannot be adequately characterized in simple terms of right and wrong or good and bad. I see this ambiguity in Ihor Pavlyuk?s works and I am happy in the knowledge that there is a very good poet in Ukraine.

Mo Yan, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012

Ihor Pavlyuk's poems have been sensitively rendered into English. The subtle music of Stephen Komarnykyj's translations echoes the delicacy and depth of the poet's visions, where despair is always infused with tenderness and personal desires drink from the well of collective dreams.

Naomi Foyle, British poet

Although Pavlyuk writes in his own highly original style, the fierce humanity of his poems reminded me of Seamus Heaney. There is also a sense as in Heaney of how intrinsically linked the present is with the past our language and our landscape scattered with pagan remnants which live inside each of us. However Pavlyuk's pagans are very much alive and dwell in the primal landscape of Polissya with its impenetrable forests and marshes.

What is it that is unique about Pavlyuk?s work and about Ukrainian literature? Why should any English language reader who picks up this book bother to turn the pages? There is, of course, a moral argument, a national literature which has been sundered from the mainstream of Europe is being returned to its rightful place. However, many people might feel that there is a ?Slavic? quality to this literature which has been adequately conveyed by Akhmetova, Chekhov etc., but in this they would be mistaken. Pavlyuk?s poetic world, the inter¬nal cosmos he created in exile in St. Petersburg, has resulted in a rare example of a subjective, confessional poetry in a Slavic language. Equally, the traditions on which he draws, in particular the modern baroque of the authors of the Executed Renaissance, are almost unknown in the English speaking world and have qualities which could influence and enrich English poetry. As we have also seen, Pavlyuk is an emissary from a forgotten pagan Europe of open pastures where the horses of Makhno?s anarchists roam. There was, of course, much that was wrong with that world, but equally, our estrangement from the lives once lived in the fields outside our cities has impoverished us. Pavlyuk?s voice is the voice of these nowun-peopled fields. I invite you to sit with...