Set Change

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. (Nov.)