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Loading... What We Live For, What We Die For: Selected Poemsby Serhiy Zhadan
None No current Talk conversations about this book.  avaland | Jan 14, 2024 |    ) librarianlion | Nov 22, 2022 | no reviews | add a review
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An introduction to an original poetic voice from eastern Ukraine with deep roots in the unique cultural landscape of post-Soviet devastation "Everyone can find something, if they only look carefully," reads one of the memorable lines from this first collection of poems in English by the world†'renowned Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan. These robust and accessible narrative poems feature gutsy portraits of life on wartorn and poverty-ravaged streets, where children tally the number of local deaths, where mothers live with low expectations, and where romance lives like a remote memory. In the tradition of Tom Waits, Charles Bukowski, and William S. Burroughs, Zhadan creates a new poetics of loss, a daily crusade of testimonial, a final witness of abandoned lives in a claustrophobic universe where "every year there's less and less air." Yet despite the grimness of these portraits, Zhadan's poems are familiar and enchanting, lit by the magic of everyday detail, leaving readers with a sense of hope, knowing that the will of a people "will never let it be / like it was before." No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)891.7Literature Literature of other languages Literature of east Indo-European and Celtic languages Russian and East Slavic languagesLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.17)
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Wikipedia in English
1
The poems in this collection are somewhat longer than those in the new volume, but it didn't deter me. They are a good introduction on the poet and his work. I love this guy's poetry. Period.
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"TAKE ONLY WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT"
Take only what is most important. Take the letters.
Take only what you can carry.
Take the icons and the embroidery, take the silver,
Take the wooden crucifix and the golden replicas.
Take some bread, the vegetables from the garden, then leave.
We will never return again.
We will never see our city again.
Take the letters, all of them, every last piece of bad news.
We will never see our corner store again.
We will never drink from that dry well again.
We will never see familiar faces again.
We are refugees. We’ll run all night.
We will run past fields of sunflowers.
We will run from dogs, rest with cows.
We’ll scoop up water with our bare hands,
sit waiting in camps, annoying the dragons of war.
You will not return, and friends will never come back.
There will be no smoky kitchens, no usual jobs,
There will be no dreamy lights in sleepy towns,
no green valleys, no suburban wastelands.
The sun will be a smudge on the window of a cheap train,
rushing past cholera pits covered with lime.
There will be blood on women’s heels,
tired guards on borderlands covered with snow,
a postman with empty bags shot down,
a priest with a hapless smile hung by his ribs,
the quiet of cemetery, the noise of a command post,
and unedited lists of the dead,
as long that there won’t be enough time
to check them for your own name.
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