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After the previous post on Joseph O’Connor, I did not expect to be writing about courage again so soon. Nor, after starting things off with Ogden Nash a week ago, did I think I would write about poetry again this quickly. I am on surer ground with prose than with poetry. But I came across a story over the weekend that caused me to change plans and spend another Sunday afternoon reading verse.
About two months ago, as part of a symposium on Ukraine and the future of international order held at Houghton University, where I teach, I participated in a session on a pair of recent works by Ukrainian literary figures. One of them was Serhiy Zhadan’s Sky Above Kharkiv: Dispatches From the Ukrainian Front. Zhadan is one of Ukraine’s best-known poets, though he has also written novels; this particular volume collected Facebook posts he had written during the first months following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Zhadan is a beloved figure in Ukraine. In addition to his literary acclaim, he is the front-man for a rock band called “Zhadan and the Dogs” (you can find them on YouTube). He is also a prominent spokesman for Ukrainian independence in the face of Russian aggression. He was active in both the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Maidan Revolution. Since February 2022 he has helped deliver humanitarian aid and military supplies in and around Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, a major target of Russian attacks early in the war and the object of a renewed offensive over the past month.
But now Zhadan has decided that his considerable efforts—volunteer work, fund-raising, publicity and international efforts in support of the war—are not enough. He has joined the “Khartia” brigade of the Ukrainian national guard. I saw this reported in the Frankfurter Rundschau, but there are short English reports on his decision in both the Kyiv Independent and the Kyiv Post. The time had come, it seems, for Zhadan to put down his pen and take up the sword.
So I decided to read through a recent volume of his poems in English translation, How Fire Descends: New and Selected Poems, translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps and published as part of Yale’s Margellos World Republic of Letters series. The small volume includes selections from four earlier collections of Zhadan’s lyrics, along with nine new poems. All have been written within the past decade—subsequent, that is, to Russia’s occupation of the eastern Donbas in 2014.
The war is by no means always present in these poems, though it is often in the background. The first poem in the book—one of the most recent, since the volume begins with the newest poems and then proceeds in reverse chronological order, with the oldest poems at the end—begins with the lines, “When so much is taken away / something is always given in return.” That sense of hope in the face of loss is one of the book’s recurrent themes. It returns again in the very last poem, which tells us that “the war has lasted a century”—unfortunately, all too true, as anyone familiar with Ukraine’s history since World War I can attest—but concludes with an affirmation: “It’s a good thing, it’s all like it was in the beginning.”
This sense of hope in the face of fragility and loss marks two more of the collection’s preoccupations: our need for human relationships (especially romantic love, but also relationships toward past and future generations) and the power or weakness of language and poetry. “What’s important,” we read, “is that no one can resist / the temptation of falling hopelessly in love.” Men and women will keep doing it, even when they are “like whales who hurl themselves onto beaches,” rushing toward their doom. Even lovers can find themselves “as lonely as hands / hidden in separate coat pockets”; nevertheless, “the possibility of sharing remains.”
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So too with words. Many of the poems reflect upon poetry itself. Like love, poetry is an expression of hope in the face of transience, an attempt to defy temporality through human passion and creativity. We know that words often fail us, whether in our friendships and love affairs or on the grand stage of politics and diplomacy. “Books cannot save us,” and poets are sometimes more convenient dead than alive—if you bury them near shopping malls, “they make good tourist attractions.” Even so, “language is important even after death,” perhaps because “the value of a poem grows in the wintertime.”
Fall and winter make frequent appearances here, as do the months of September, October, and November. Indeed, the collection as a whole has a somewhat autumnal mood, the sense that things are coming to an end, that all things must come to an end—but also that this is not the last word, and that spring will come again, the ice will thaw, new life will return. “Spring comes to the gray zone,” writes Zhadan, and we might add, even to the gray zone, since that is the name for the no-man’s-land between the Russian and Ukrainian lines in the Donbas, a zone from which so many people have fled since 2014. Within this flow of time, when the most precious things can be lost at any moment, Zhadan urges us to remember the past, attend carefully to the present, and look forward with hope to the future. “Eternity is made up of individual seconds,” and we should treasure each one of them. Their passing leaves a sense of loss, but impermanence is not the last word:
now it is clear that death will win,
but still
it will be forced to withdraw.
Zhadan struck a similar note in Sky Above Kharkiv, where many of his reprinted Facebook posts ended with a kind of poetic refrain: “Ukrainian flags still flutter above the city.”
One of the early poems in the collection encapsulates many of these themes in its title: “The Meaning of Winter Changes.” Written in 2021, shortly before the full-scale Russian invasion, it is among the poems that deal most explicitly with the war—a useful reminder to us in the West that Ukraine was suffering even before most of us were paying a great deal of attention. It includes a nicely evocative line: “We still have to defend Troy in the morning.” Serhiy Zhadan, as a member of the Ukrainian National Guard in Kharkiv, is now doing just that, morning after morning. May he and his comrades enjoy greater success than the Trojans did.
Thanks for reading. See you later this week for another installment From My Bookshelf.