In Letters of the Alphabet Go to War, Ukrainian poet Lesyk Panasiuk recounts the carnage and wreckage of war in his home town of Bucha, “once a cozy town of artists, scientists, and doctors.” The story emerges not only in vivid details of witnessed events, but takes shape most urgently in the way events are transformed in the poetic imagination. As the title tells us, letters of the alphabet join battle, with an almost human agency. Dismantled from words and meaning, they are both frightened conscripted soldiers and angry revolutionaries, or they merely find themselves hapless in the war zone. A writer using the alphabet must work in a silence imposed by the unfolding horrors. Poetic form helps to tell the narrative. Full-page visual art depicts the disarranged alphabet. Panasiuk describes the war as both impersonal in its systems, and intimate in its slaughter.
The poems, written in irregular line lengths, allow expansion and contraction of scene and sense. The word-landscape suggests uneven terrain, where sudden arrests of time, mine explosions, and then human outpourings collide within poems. This mirrors the jolting advancing of the war. In the poem “Our Faces Tossed About This Land,” form helps deliver a tone of disbelief. The first line states a fact, and the second line shocks. Then comes the briefest report, delivered in halting speech and broken pulsed lines. In this stanza, long lines gradually diminish, suggesting an end in silence.
Russian soldiers drop from the sky.
clinging to the parachutes of our faces
to the corners
of our lips
their fingers
hook.
This surreal moment jars the poem, arriving at the next stanza:
These parachutes, torn, are no
longer our cheeks
our noses our teeth:
in the mirror
I do not see my face.
The face, the most vulnerable, expressive part of a human has been stolen by the enemy as a vehicle for its invasion. Disembodiment of people and words runs through the book. The poet co-mingles with the devastations of a language that is visibly torn apart in bombed signage on the streets, and in burning books in apartments. Even the windows of individual letters shatter, lose a roof. Stories that should be told are eviscerated by war, leaving corpses and silence.
The language in a time of war
can’t be understood. Inside this sentence
is a hole—no one wants to die—no one
speaks…
The second section of the poem “Our Faces Tossed About This Land” details an attack on private space. Russian soldiers park a tank in the yard, break into the apartment. Books of incalculable value are burned to make a fire.
Explain this poem a soldier asks our neighbors
while tossing
them against walls
asks our neighbors to explain a line break
while raping their wives a third time a fourth time a fifth
Soldiers use the book fire to cook a soup with stolen vegetables. Books and bodies are abused for the enemy’s satisfaction. The marauders are aggravated by mysteries of the poems and line breaks, a strange tribute to their power. A broken line is a symbol of war. The soldiers mock a child’s photo album: “He hugs the toy dog, just like a girl.”
Obviously these are dire conditions for a writer. Yes, the bombings, but also the profound silence of a fearful population. “Fear is in the air like the smell of new paint.” In this poetry silence is a medium out of which each word is pressed with great care. Each costs something. Each has the weight of what is at stake. Rarely are we privileged to read such raw-pressed language as is given here.
Sometimes the mood communicates matter-of-fact suffering, a dissociation from the trauma. In one poem a dream is related. The speaker tells us simply: “I see that I have lost a leg.”
I realize that I am no longer, that I no longer fear
my own mutilation, or even death, a lightness,
unbearable, settles in.
That very day, I buy tickets home.
These lines are from the second longer sequence titled “A Shoe Full of Water A Diary of a Return.” The second section begins with the poet arriving by train in his city, which is broken and empty of people. He walks through the neighborhood, approaches his apartment, approaches his door, enters his rooms. The arrival is slow with delayed revelations, like memory. The apartment building “looks like a starry sky / riddled with glowing holes. Cosmic, and bitter.” Civilization has returned to nature, the sky open and the rooms covered in feathers and bird droppings. Memory has been purged by the sun.—a roll of film from the poet’s wedding was unexposed, but the invading soldiers ripped it out of the camera, ruining it.
Stark symbols loom in the narrative. Language returns as tracks made by tanks in the roads. They appear to Panasiuk as “primitive writing,” a constant and enduring reminder of the war. The city is “a leaf, eaten by pests.” Full-page visual art portrays the letters at war. They seem to have exploded from words, leaving meaningless shrapnel—single letters paired with a dot. Each dot begs to be connected to the other dots to form a picture, a new language rising from the demolition. Perhaps a Russian-fluent person could connect the dots meaningfully as words (the letters are Russian). The last page of these exploding letters is black with white dots, bringing to mind the riddled apartment building resembling a starry sky.
Many verbal images arise, some quite surreal. The surreality feels inevitable as a known world collapses. Seemingly unrelated things crash into each other as in a physical explosion, and establish relationship. In “Empty Case” Panasiuk writes of astronauts dying who “cannot rise to outer space and lie inside a contrabass case.” The empty case is a black hole “sucking concert halls inside the spit of each empty seat.” The empty case is a powerful symbol of the loss of music, in itself, but also as a dimension of language, especially poetry.
Another verbal image made me smile, then weep, in the poem “Russian Accordion.”
O the accordion of a municipal bus!
your insides
are expanding with our silence which
we take from our apartments to factories and offices
and take it from work back home
and from home to hospitals and from hospitals to groceries.
The image conjures the music of silence, as well as the silenced music the war requires.
The war is waged as an impersonal machine with the bodies of soldiers wreaking personal harm. What could be more personal than rape, denying personhood of the victim, yet assaulting in a most degrading intimate encounter of bodies. In another tactic, a naked foot should step into a mine inside a slipper.
One wonders how any poetry could get written under such circumstances. The meaning of war may be elusive, but metaphor and music transform moments we can hold onto. Poetry, oblique and referential, embeds secrets no secret service can uncover. Never stated as philosophy, we nevertheless find clues of what it means to be human, even in the face of grotesque inhumanity.
We marvel at the “cosmic, but bitter.” The existence of this book is a testament to the transcendent power of the alphabet going to war—armed against the silence, erupting in poetry.
Words matter—these charged, winged words—reassembled among ruins by an extraordinary poet.