Serhiy Zhadan (b. 1974) is a well-known figure in contemporary east European literature. It is no surprise, therefore, that Lost Horse Press's fifth volume in the Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series is devoted entirely to his work. It is a dual-text (Ukrainian-Russian) publication. The volume opens with an introductory essay “An American Prayer for Agnostics and Atheists,” followed by a selection of verses from Zhadan's collections “Catalogue of Ships” (2020), “Aerial” (2018), and “Knights Templar” (2016). The collection is an insightful and incisive chronicle of everyday life that, despite its composite nature, reads like a single continuous narrative.

The opening essay is a panegyric to America's ethos through which Zhadan revisits his cultural interactions on his visits there in 1996, 2005, and 2017. His initial impression of the country is romantic and definite: America's ethos is poetry. His final conclusion is somber: poetry is dying, it is turning into a dead language, “however, even in our—beautiful and crazy—world a place for poetry remains, and it's a little too early to talk about its calm and careless death” (xxix).

The verses are imbued with a searing sense of uprootedness and hopelessness caused by the ongoing strange and horrific civil war in southeastern Ukraine. The anonymous protagonists in the poems are desperately seeking some relief and spiritual anchor, which they hope to find in religious faith, but the bridges that they expect to lead them to some sort of inner tranquility have been destroyed by the war. What the seekers are left with are recurring, variously baffling visions of Christ that frustratingly keep getting obliterated. In one such wrenching incident, a bomb lands amidst a group of travelers on a quest for some firm ground, killing all of them.

The “endless qualities” and “mysterious structure” (27) of poetic language form the general background for the whole collection. The section “Catalogue of Ships” formulates the general task of poetry, which “shouldn't join the general insanity” (39). “Language is breathing filled with sense. Language is a phantom chance to persuade at least one person not to jump from a bridge into the Seine” (27). The title “Catalogue of Ships” is a clear allusion to Homer's Iliad and, by extension, to Osip Mandel΄shtam's “Sleeplessness” poem (written during WWI) that begins: “Homer. Taut sails. I have read the catalogue of ships down to half its length…” (Dimitri Obolenski, ed., The Heritage of Russian Verse, Indiana University Press, 1965, 352). The reference seems to have the aim of establishing a link between present-day Ukrainian poetry and ancient European culture, thereby contributing to the ongoing process of contextualizing Ukrainian national identity.

Zhadan seems to be pursuing the same cultural-historical continuity in the “Knights Templar” section, referencing the Catholic military order famous for its charitable activities in the XII-XIV centuries. But “what will happen to them [Ukrainian warriors—“knights templar”—fighting in eastern Ukraine] when they all return?” (119) asks Zhadan.

War and its consequences are a leitmotif. In the “Aerial” section, the poem on page 62, for example, is one of the many snapshots of war scattered throughout the collection: “They buried their son in winter. / Strange weather for winter—rain, thunder. / They buried him quietly—everybody's busy. / Who did he fight for? I asked. We don't know, they say. /…I would have asked him myself but now—there's no need. / And he wouldn't reply—he was buried without his head” (63). In a nutshell, the poetry in the collection is a powerful evocation of life and death and dashed hopes.

The prose and blank verse passages predominate. The two translators deal with them using straightforward translation strategies. The rhyming stretches of the original texts are relatively few, presenting the usual difficulties of having to resolve the incongruities between prosody and lexical and grammar incompatibilities. The translators also do well in this respect. A somewhat elusive problem of shifting points of view within single poems is tricky as there is little or no gender differentiation signaled by declension and conjugation endings in English. In sum, the two translators of the collection have done a great job, effectively replicating the mostly straightforward, no-nonsense language of the original with the help of straightforward, no-nonsense language in their translation.

Finally, the volume is a great introduction to contemporary Ukrainian poetry as well as an excellent resource for teaching Ukrainian to intermediate- and advanced-level students.