Maria Grazia Bartolini’s monograph on Yuriy Tarnawsky’s early poetry constitutes a revised and updated version of the book originally published in Italian in 2012, itself based on the author’s doctoral dissertation. Still, this translated work is the first major study of Tarnawsky’s Ukrainian poetic oeuvre in English. Bartolini presents it within the context of the poet’s involvement in the New York Group (the post-World War II émigré circle of Ukrainian poets of which Tarnawsky was a founding member) and from the angle of the aesthetic tension between modernism and postmodernism. The book consists of the Introduction and seven chapters followed by a short Epilogue. There is also an appendix presenting seven unpublished poems from the mid-1950s, which Bartolini uncovered in the collection of Tarnawsky’s papers at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Of all the chapters in the book, the opening chapter devoted to the New York Group is by far the longest. In fact, almost one third of this slim volume is allotted to the conceptualization and activities of the grouping, thus underscoring its importance to Tarnawsky’s overall poetic evolution. This chapter adds to the existing corpus of literature on the group but without a deeper engagement with arguments posed by the author’s predecessors who studied the phenomenon in great detail. Choosing the label of the neo-avant-garde to situate aesthetically the group’s poetic contributions (modelled by “Gruppo’63” and the Italian Neovanguardia), Bartolini does not convincingly prove that the inclination toward radical experimentation with language (so apparent in Tarnawsky’s work) equally applies to the other members of the group. But even more surprising is her claim that the group ceased to exist in 1971, coinciding with the closing of Novi poezii, the group’s annual almanac, despite the fact that the members themselves were quite ambivalent about the group’s continued existence when interviewed by John Fizer in 1988, or when they decided to celebrate its fortieth anniversary in 1996 on the pages of the journal Svito-vyd, which became the site of their renewed activities in the 1990s.

The subsequent chapters provide a more satisfying reading and deal respectively with Tarnawsky’s biography (Ch. 2, utilizing the poet’s own autobiography, “Running Barefoot Home and Back”) and the analysis of his poetry collections, from the debut volume Life in the City (1956) to Poems about Nothing and Other Poems on the Same Subject (1970) (Chs. 3–7). Bartolini capably shows the existentialist underpinnings of the poet’s debut book and her detailed discussions of his successive collections offer interesting interpretations, however, her overarching argument that Tarnawsky’s early poetry (1956–71) exemplifies the transition from modernism to postmodernism is less persuasive. By characterizing Poems about Nothing “as appearing on a surface” (140) and foregrounding “the death of the subject” (149) as manifestations of postmodernist premises, Bartolini offers a rather reductive understanding of postmodernism. The truth is Tarnawsky never stops grappling with the depths of individual existence (however absurdist it might appear), and the lyrical subject (seemingly dead in Poems about Nothing) comes back with a vengeance in his 1978 bilingual collection This Is How I Get Well (mistakenly designated by Bartolini as published only in English), as well as in his 1980s poetry.

In the Tight Triangle of the Night provides the reader with a wealth of archival material (including the poet’s previously unpublished poems) and engages with an impressive number of theoretical and philosophical works. Unfortunately, there are also errors that could have been easily avoided: misspellings of some names (Heruliak instead of Gerulak; Losovsˊkyi instead of Lasovsky), incorrect dates of births of some members of the New York Group (24) and some inconsistencies in transliteration (150).

Tarnawsky is a quintessentially bilingual author. However, after reading In the Tight Triangle of the Night, one is left with a misleading impression that following Poems about Nothing the poet has not written anything of consequence in Ukrainian. It is true that in the past two decades or so, Tarnawsky has switched to writing mostly in English, giving preference to prose works. But it is also true that his post-1971 Ukrainian poetic production is as voluminous as his early poetry (Ikh nemaie, 1970–1999 [They Are Not There]), and it is regrettable that Bartolini chose to disregard that period of Tarnawsky’s literary career. While it is a prerogative of any scholar to define his/her area of investigation for a published book, in this particular case, it is doing a disservice to a poet of Tarnawsky’s caliber to focus on only one creative period. Approaching his poetry in its totality might have perhaps yielded a different timeline for the stated transition from modernism to postmodernism.