Set Change
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The first comprehensive English-language collection of one of the most important voices in contemporary Ukrainian literature, a collection of poems about the region's history of violence as seen through geography, myth, and city life.
Yuri Andrukhovych is one of the most compelling and influential contemporary Ukrainian writers, the author of a body of work that ranges from the novel to the essay to poetry and that stands out in every genre for being thoughtful, playful, free-spirited, and astonishingly new. His career took off in the waning years of the Soviet Union, when underground artists and writers and the rumbles of rock music coming from abroad all helped to bring the walls of the sclerotic Communist empire tumbling down.
Set Change draws on the poetry Andrukhovych wrote in the eighties and nineties, before he turned his attention to prose. The collection shows him beginning on a quest to represent and do justice to Ukraine's long history of violence. He explores the overlapping and shifting borders of Eastern Europe while also venturing into realms of fantasy and myth. Again and again, he returns to the idea of the city as a space of carnivalesque disguise and discovery. Drawing on the rich resources of Ukrainian literature, from the amplitude of the baroque to the austerely powerful configurations of the lost modernist generation, Andrukhovych's poems are ironic and elegiac, witty and allusive, lyrical, experimental, and political. As translated into English by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, they offer readers a powerfully transformative vision of the place of poetry in a fractured world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brilliantly translated by Kin and Hennessy, this captivating collection from Ukrainian poet Andrukhovych is animated by local legend, regional history, and personal recollection. Drawn from Andrukhovych's five previous books and poetic cycles, these poems share an elegiac tone, imagining long-gone neighborhood characters as "ready again for quarrels and gossip," in "lived-in cities... like soccer balls pierced with knives." Andrukhovych is sensitive to the way emotional states shape experience as materially as facts; the pedestrians in an early poem walk with "their moods dependent on love and weather, coats and sorrows carried over their shoulders." Some entries conjure up specific eccentrics, like the litigious Dr. Dutka, who "on the slope of wasted years... ended up as helpless as a bird in a bag," and the umbrella repairman Oliynyk, whose shop, "a chapel embedded in a mossy wall," is frequented by "the whole melancholy city." Others look further back into Ukrainian and Eastern European history, to the last recorded "public burning of sorceresses" in 1719. Wide-ranging and representative of Andrukhovych's many strengths, this is a valuable English-language introduction to an important poet.
