Winter King

This volume gathers roughly fifteen years of poems by Ostap Slyvynsky, one of the more prominent contemporary poets in Ukraine. It draws on three of his earlier collections and adds some of his most recent work.

Much of Slyvynsky's material is ordinary life: childhood games, old trees, and the stories families pass down. Through these modest scenes, his poems sketch the outline of a whole era. He is skilled at reading individual voices and recollections for traces of major historical events, and he does so without reducing personal experience to a mere backdrop for those events.

The poems are spare and lean, yet they describe a human reality that feels both shared and intensely local. Their landscapes range from a family house in the Carpathian Mountains to the Maidan in Kyiv during the revolution. Dense with detail and open to ambiguity, the poems reward rereading, since each pass uncovers another layer. Beneath those layers, the poet's deep sense of humanity remains constant.