Award-winning Ukrainian-American poet, translator, and founding editor of Four Way Books Dzvinia Orlowsky brings to readers a collection of poems attuned to the question “What does poetry offer during times of war and crisis?” Fusing the mythical with the political and the global with the personal, the poems in Orlowsky’s Those Absences Now Closest offers a reflective authority about generational trauma and family stories and their necessity for the diaspora during times of war and hardship. These poems bear witness to the tragedies unfolding in war-torn Ukraine, and they bring the nightmarish demons of war—both figurative and literal—to the forefront for all to see.
“The (Dis)enchanted Desna: A Poem Sequence,” which the epigraph claims is written “after Oleksandr Dovzhenko (1894-1956) in a time of Putin” is a beautiful thread of poems written in careful, imagistic language. For readers unfamiliar with Ukrainian history, Oleksandr Dovzhenko was a Soviet filmmaker of Ukrainian origin whose films frequently upset communist authorities. The reference to Dovzhenko seems only appropriate, given the sequence’s cinematic flair. The sequence’s first segment, “Desolate,” is comprised of four imagistic stanzas. A mysterious male figure, referred to only as “he,” possesses “no soul, only steam” and “no voice, only drones.” Contrasting the militaristic, industrial sensations formed by words like “steam” and “drones” are images of nature and animals. However, the decomposition and death take hold and grip the scenes:
watermelon—seeds
instead of memories—
no woods, only withered grass,
no roar, only labored horses
and buckling calves,
no bread, only one bowed fruitless tree.
He had no angels, only the din of buzzing bees.
The grip the mysterious figure holds tightens even more in the sequence’s second installment, “Right Hand.” Structured as a series of couplets, the poem waxes surreal and almost biblical. The figure “held in his right hand / tender calves and dipped-black horses / a devil escaped from a circus, / prowling on the riverbank.” The figure’s path of destruction continues, but a sense that the figure is attempting to conceal his actions also emerges:
With his right hand, he shut all dusky
windows and wind-blown doors,
commanded, with a vigorous gesture,
that a seventh son be born.
It is, nonetheless, the poem’s final stanzas that are the most evocative and provocative:
rabbits disappeared into tiny holes,
The orange sunset tore itself on black branches
but worshippers called it beautiful,
considered themselves saved.
The sense of false salvation is reminiscent of current socio-political commentary from both the United States and Russia. In the United States, far-right and white Christian nationalists view president-elect Donald Trump as a savior-figure who will deliver the United States from the “evil progressives” threatening their version of American democracy. Many of these far-right, white Christian nationalists have showed support for Vladimir Putin because of Russia’s display of and support of ethnic, racial, and sexual bigotry. The worshippers in Orlowsky’s book who call the “orange sunset” beautiful are much like the American evangelicals who venerate Putin, who according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, do so because they see him as “the defender of an ethnically homogenous ‘Christian society.’” Thus, with this interpretation, “Right Hand” develops a subtly political tone and even serves as a political warning not only for Ukraine, but for anyone who believes in democracy and freedom.
Another poem in the sequence, “Measuring for a Coffin,” draws on historical and intergenerational legacy as its foundation. Nonetheless, the images of “your great-grandmother / laid out on a bench” with “her head / pointed toward icons, her curses” conceal the poem’s true political potential. Thus, the poem is quaintly deceptive. At first, it reads as a speaker’s recollection about a deceased great-grandmother. The great-grandmother seems, even in death, the figure who controls the family lore and narratives:
Give her six feet. She’ll take with her
a second helping of the last road
that stretched before her,
the early cock’s crow—
just so you and your family won’t
have it all.
Initially, the sentiment makes the great-grandmother seem almost sacrificial, as though she is attempting to spare the family her trauma and hardship. However, on another level, the grandmother seems spiteful and greedy. Therefore, it is at these moments in the poem that the poem develops a duality, a sensorial confusion, that only resolves as the speaker unpacks the reality of the great-grandmother’s death. This confusion, nonetheless, remanifests in the final stanza:
You’ll want your pigs to think
they’ll be fed well for the slaughter,
blind beggars to think you’re rich.
More so, the pigs who “think / they’ll be fed well for the slaughter” mirror the worshippers in “Right Hand” who called the orange sunset “beautiful” and “considered themselves saved.” The pigs are thematically significant, too. Pigs are a staple for backyard farms in Ukraine, and many rural families rely on their pigs for food. Their inclusion reiterates the importance of these farms to rural Ukrainians, and along with the traditional burial imagery, create not only a sense of earthiness, but also an intertwining of farm life, domestic life, survival, and personal existence. However, at a more metaphorical level, their inclusion elicits biblical connotations: pigs were seen as unclean, and in The Book of Matthew, Jesus Christ drives the demons from two men and into pigs.
One of the collection’s most memorable poems is “If we weren’t knocking on wood,” which again relies on familial memories and old-world traditions as its foundation. The title refers to the Ukrainian cultural tradition of “knocking on wood,” a superstition were people tap on wood to ward away bad luck. The poem also refers to the act of “spitting our way to safety,” a reference to the act of spitting over one’s left shoulder in order to thwart words’ magical powers. Tradition binds the poem, and the heartfelt attitude towards signs given to the living from the dead is a powerful nod toward how, in the diaspora, “a mystical lexicon” exists for the “secret beliefs” those in that culture share and keep. The poem also pays homage to the Ukrainian cultural attitude that the dead are a significant part of life. For example, the speaker acknowledges, “The dead always had our best interest / in mind. All we had to do was ask.” Life and death intertwine in the poem; as the dead make one journey, the living make another—never forgetting those who came before them and those who have left. In a sense, this single poem truly embodies the collection’s ethos, particularly if the collection is considered in the context of the current war in Ukraine. As the war rages and enters its third year, death has, unfortunately, become even more entwined with daily life for Ukrainians.
Those Absences Now Closest is truly one of the most important contributions to the ever-growing canon of diasporic Ukrainian literature to arrive since the full-scale invasion began in 2022. Itis a poetic meditation on the spaces where life, death, and memory intertwine and shape the everyday lives of those who endure war in the modern world. It quietly calls for collective empathy, political advocacy, and generational remembrance. Folkloric and magical, it is a reminder of why poetry is a necessity during not only humanity’s darkest moments, but also an individual’s. Its pages are where old-world traditions fuse with modernity to ignite eternal memory’s flames and give hope in a seemingly hopeless time.
Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, New Eastern Europe, Euromaidan Press, Chytomo, and The New Voice of Ukraine. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University, and is the Humanities Coordinator at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College. She also serves as a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and Southern Review of Books. Her poetry collection, The Pale Goth, is available from Alien Buddha Press.