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Reflections from Poetry Editor Frances Hatfield
Earlier this year, I attended an online poetry reading fundraiser for Ukraine offered by Poetry Mesa. Everyone who attended, myself included, was stunned and shaken by the power of the poems offered by Iryna Shuvalova, Halyna Kruk, and Iryna Starovoyt. Though I was unable to meet those poets, I eventually found, with the help of literary scholar Dr. Vitaly Chernetsky and others, our equally brilliant featured poets Ostap Slyvynsky, Anastasia Afanasieva, Lyuba Yakimchuk, and Vasyl Makhno. Included here are new, previously unpublished poems, along with work that first appeared in Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (2017), which was written in response to the 2014 Russian invasion and annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea.
The shadow of a fleeing Ukrainian Family on the wall painted in the Ukrainian flag colors. (Courtesy: Shutterstock)
Here, instead of the rubble of schools and hospitals, we are shown, in the words of Vasyl Makhno, the inner “periodic table of ruins.” Anastasia Afanasieva asks, “Can there be poetry after … poetry devolves to ‘autistic babbling’”? Paradoxically, the devastatingly eloquent power of the poems themselves, arising like a phoenix out of ashes, defies the “decomposition” of language that Lyuba Yakimchuk depicts, in which “only letters remain/and they all make a single sound—rrr,” and in “New Song of Silence,” when Afanasieva speaks of consciousness as being reduced to listening for bombs “in the half-second when a bomb is already dropped but hasn’t reached/the target.” In “crow, wheels,” Yakimchuk shows us a surreal Easter “carnival” in a cemetery where vodka is poured on the graves of the dead, who “asked for more, and more, and more/and their relatives kept pouring,” eerily evoking war as ongoing transgenerational trauma. Ostap Slyvynsky speaks to the emotional devastation of war in “Latifa,” as he imagines what to say to his child who asks when they can go home. He uses coats of paint as a metaphor for the deep layers of love built up over years that made the house “so good to us, Alim,/that it could not stand on earth anymore,” so that “you could see nothing but/sky from the windows now./And angels too./But there is no one home./Because angels are not for the living to see.”
The title of this poetry feature, “Too Close to Infinity,” from Slyvynsky’s poem “Like Wood without Fire,” amplifies the ways in which the annihilation of so much of what ties one to existence can itself create an identity so close to the void that infinity
In “cats,” Lyuba Yakimchuk also depicts the oblivion that threatens with the loss of home. From her exile in Las Vegas, she dreams of flying away home, by plane, bus, taxi, bicycle, and finally running barefoot:
The last poem, which opens with “once you were wandering in the hills,” by Vasyl Makhno, leads us even further into the utter desolation at the edge of the void, that of the homeless refugee whose people have been “swept like crumbs off the table/and only you remember the words that no one else knows,” where
Those who understand the psychic damage wrought by severe traumas in early life, its bleak landscapes of crushing despair and frozen wastelands, the shattering of language and capacity for thought, and the long road of healing that transforms them, will recognize the ways in which these poets have taken the unbearable tragedies created by war and, by exquisitely naming the sheer and brutal reality of the devastation with consummate skill, are working to transubstantiate them into soul. As poet Kait Rokowski observed, “Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.” One can imagine the supreme gift to their own people these poems offer. My hope is that the power of these poems to shake us open can make of us an invisible channel of support as well as inspire other kinds of aid for our suffering neighbors and lovers of freedom. May these poems also startle us alive to the precious and precarious gifts of life we still possess—perhaps not for long—in “freedom’s messy kitchen.”