Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series – serie

A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan is the fifth volume in Lost Horse Press's Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. In these poems, the poet focuses on daily life during the Russo-Ukrainian war, rendering intimate portraits of the country's residents as they respond to crisis.Zhadan revives and revises the role of the nineteenth-century Romantic bard, one who portrays his community with clarity, preserving its most precious aspects and darkest nuances. The poems investigate questions of home, exile, solitude, love, and religious faith, making vivid the experiences of noncombatants, refugees, soldiers, and veterans.This collection will be of interest to those who study how poetry observes and mirrors the shifts within a country during wartime, and it offers solace as well.

Apricots of Donbas is a bilingual collection by award-winning contemporary Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk. 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.

Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow brings together a selection of Natalka Bilotserkivets's poetry from the last four decades. Having established an English-language following largely on the merits of a single poem, Bilotserkivets's larger body of work continues to be relatively unknown. She was an active participant in "Ukraine's Renaissance" of the late-Soviet and early-independence period. Now, nearly thirty years on, much has changed in her birth land, but the lyricism and urgency in Bilotserkivets's poetry remain; her voice still speaks about movement and restricted movement, even symbolic movement. Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow endeavors to return to shed light on the missing history.

Boris Khersonsky and Ludmila Khersonsky write poetry that speaks to the crisis of our time, when refugees run from bombardments, nonstop propaganda flows from TV, and neighbors begin to hate their neighbors. The setting is Ukraine at the start of the twenty-first century, but it is eerily recognizable anywhere. These brief lyric poems speak about the memory of historical trauma and witness stark individual voices that pierce the wall of complacency. What is the music of such times? What is its metaphysics? This collection gives us an unflinching, memorable response.

In this collection, Oleh Lysheha creates worlds in which horses drawn on Paleolithic caves speak their truths and the glance of a swan can transform a lost soul. Each poem leads us down an invisible path that keeps shifting, transforming us and our ideas of poetry, together with the story. In a concluding essay, artistic director Virlana Tkacz relates the story of the translations collected in this volume and the productions she staged with them at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York.

Kateryna Kalytko's sophisticated poetry volume, Nobody Knows Us Here, and We Don't Know Anyone, deals with separations and changes, hinting at the ongoing war in Ukraine. One can intuit that the characters, succinctly depicted, are Crimean Tatars, Jews, or the displaced citizens of Ukraine, refugees from the occupied territories. However, these departures and partings, acute alienation and pain that permeate the poems, could also be read as elements of a more philosophical and global matrix, relevant to any region and each and every human being. Losses, wars, and abandoned houses in Kalytko's visual images are stunningly detailed, and her poetic language rich and exuberant.

A Violin from the Other Riverside is a dual-language collection by outstanding Ukrainian poet of the post-World War II generation, Dmytro Kremin (1953-2017). It is a philosophical bow strung with a Ukrainian timeline arrow: its nock in the prehistoric Pontic steppe, its fletching made of Scythia, Ancient Greece and Rome, its shaft of the Cossack lore. The arrow's sharp point is aimed at the warfare which Ukraine has been subjected to by Russian occupants since 2014. Passionate yet impartial, the Violin performs a complex tune of elements and temperaments, epic and drama, love and hate, universal and personal, wisdom and folly. Each poem is akin to a dictionary entry on Ukraine composed in complex and intellectually laden, yet colourful and virtuosic, light-footed verse. Kremin proved to be prophetic in his harbingering of Ukraine's martyrdom and glory as the world battlefield of darkness and light.

The Winter King by Ostap Slyvynsky presents a selection from a decade and a half worth of work by one of Ukraine's most prominent contemporary voices in poetry. Slyvynsky is the poet of everyday things. He writes of children's games, old trees, and family stories. Yet, what emerges from under his pen is a portrait of an era. His writing, simultaneously delicate and unflinchingly incisive, like a surgeon's hand, always probes for the bottomless depths gaping behind the mundane. Perhaps the greatest of Slyvynsky's gifts as a poet is his ability to examine individual voices and memories for traces of larger historical events without ever trivializing the former in the face of the latter. His spare, lean poems unearth a complex and layered human reality that is both universal and strikingly, almost painfully rooted in the landscape that birthed it, be it the poet's family home in the Carpathian mountains or the Maidan square in Kyiv, aflame with revolution. Slyvynsky's remarkable attention to detail results in strikingly beautiful and enigmatic texts that invite multiple re-readings, each peeling off yet another layer of reality. However, what always remains at the core after these layers are stripped off is the poet's profound humanity. Drawing on three of Slyvynsky's earlier poetry collections, this volume also includes some of his most recent poems--arguably, among the poet's best.

Details of an Hourglass chronicles the anti-world of Soviet prison camps in miniature-poem reflections. Its author, Mykola Horbal, spent 16 years in the notorious Gulag system where he suffered under grueling labor, deprivation, and humiliation. Stripping down the poetic word to its bare form, Horbal's verses are brief, terse, and densely layered with metaphor. Alongside emptiness, anger, irony, and absurdity, there is beauty, hope, and faith. Horbal describes his harsh reality as a "freeing spiritual journey." He distances himself from falsehood, servility, and despair by seeking solace and peace in an inner world filled with nature and God's grace.Today, the Soviet prison system has collapsed, but the need to bear witness to that past is vital. World-wide human rights repressions and unjust incarcerations thrive through both subtle, sophisticated methods and brazen military aggression and brutality. Horbal's poetry is an aphoristic testament that you can imprison the body but not the spirit.