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MOUNTAIN AND FLOWER

MOUNTAIN AND FLOWER

$20.00Price

ISBN: 978-1-7333400-5-2

Pub Date: Sept. 2020

Pages: 126


By Mykola Vorobiov

Maria G. Rewakowic, translator


Mountain and Flower is Mykola Vorobiov’s second book in English translation, presenting a selection of poems spanning more than fifty years of his poetic craft. The book begins with early poems from his first collection, Remind Me for the Road, to his most recent works. One of the founding members of the nonconformist literary group known as the Kyiv School of Poetry, early Vorobiov is known for his preoccupation with metaphor and surreal imagery. In his more mature poetry he reveals himself as a master of miniature, with considerable affinity to Japanese haiku where the perception of a fleeting moment constitutes the essence of his poems’ rationale. Nature reigns supreme in Vorobiov’s poetic oeuvre and it provides him with endless opportunity for creating startling images. His intuitive connection to the surrounding environs is so penetrating and organic that his visions, however strange, come across as convincing and justified. There are hardly any references to Ukrainian realities (past or present) in his poetry. Vorobiov’s concerns hover around the issues of existence on all possible levels—plants, animals, humans, inanimate objects, and the universe. The poet is not interested in conveying the past; rather, he trusts his imagination as the ultimate source of creativity. Mountain and Flower attempts to penetrate the invisible that has no beginning and no end, and invites the reader to plunge into this mysterious unknown.


    Born in central Ukraine in 1941, Mykola Vorobiov is a well-known poet, painter, and one of the founding members of the Kyiv School of Poetry nonconformist literary group. He made his poetry debut in 1962, but after his expulsion from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 1968 for being “ideologically unreliable,” he was no longer permitted to publish. His first poetry collection, Remind Me for the Road, came out only in 1985, after eighteen years of silence. Since then, more than ten volumes of poetry have appeared, including Wild Dog Rose Moon (1992), his first book in English translation. As a painter, Vorobiov has participated in a number of solo and group art shows, mostly in Kyiv. His artistic vision, like his poetry, relies on metaphor, conveying reality through deeply expressive imagery. A recipient of the prestigious 2005 Shevchenko National Prize in Literature, Vorobiov lives in Kyiv, Ukraine.



    Maria G. Rewakowicz is a poet, translator, and literary scholar. She holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Toronto and has taught Ukrainian literature at a number of universities, most recently at Rutgers University—New Brunswick, NJ. She has authored four collections of poetry in Ukrainian and two monographs of literary criticism in English. Her most recent book Ukraine’s Quest for Identity: Embracing Cultural Hybridity in Literary Imagination, 1991-2011 (2018) is the 2019 winner of the Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies. Her translations from Polish and Ukrainian have appeared in Agni, Cyphers, Modern Poetry in Translation, Modern Haiku, and Toronto Slavic Annual. 


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