The Essential Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych

In Ukraine, Antonych was and remains something akin to a poetic cult figure, first and foremost among younger poets. The striking innovativeness of his poetic mode of thinking has profoundly shaped the creative expressiveness of succeeding generations, including the most recent. Yuri Andrukhovych, Ukrainian poet, novelist, and essayist

[Antonych’s] poems . . . deserve to be read alongside the work of his great contemporaries, such as Lorca and Mandelstam. It’s there that the poet’s metaphoric power comes fully into its own. Michael Naydan has done a major service in carrying over Antonych's dense, syntactically supple verse into English. Askold Melnyczuk, poet, novelist, and professor of English, University of Massachusetts at Boston

. . . as far as Naydan's selection is concerned, The Essential Poetry is truly excellent and leaves almost nothing to be desired . . . a praiseworthy and important step in the process of introducing this major Ukrainian poet (still largely unknown in the West) to readers and scholars in the English-language world. Journal of Ukrainian Studies

Between Arcadia and catastrophe—this is where the Ukrainian poet Bohdan Ihor Antonych fearlessly searched for the truth, 'the primeval word' that shapes the work of the most original literary explorers. Though his life was cut short in 1937, before he had reached the age of thirty, he produced a number of memorable poems, all of which live on in the musically rich translations of Michael Naydan. Longing to transcend his dark moment in history, Antonych was determined to find his 'home beyond a star,' in poems that reflect what he learned from translating Rilke, reading Whitman and Czeslaw Milosz, and imagining how 'the night heals everyone forever.' His ecstasies and elegies are indeed essential reading. Christopher Merrill, author of On the Road to Lviv

These translations bring us the intimate and ecstatic visions of a young poet as he steps onto the world stage. Through an archetypal animation of nature, where ‘woodpeckers strike green sparks from the trees,’ we follow Antonych, ‘a pagan in love with life,’ in search of ‘the primal word’—‘fire, a god, a bird, or a storm’—and by his exuberance, between ‘human fear and rapture,’ we are lead through his visionary journey, where ‘Sleepwalkers sing on the roofs, / landscapes turn silver, / walls in rooms rustle like the forest, / and the dead moon, the blue moon / opens five gates of night / above a black and glimmering city.’ These are magical poems. James Brasfield, translator of The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha