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SONGS FOR A DEAD ROOSTER

SONGS FOR A DEAD ROOSTER

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9991994-0-4

Pub Date: Sept. 2018

Pages: 142


By Yuri Andrukhovych

Vitaly Chernetsky and Ostap Kin, translators


The second installment in Lost Horse Press’ Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series presents a selection of poems by Yuri Andrukhovych, one of contemporary Ukraine’s leading writers. While Andrukhovych is well known internationally as a novelist and essayist, his recognition in Ukraine was first as a poet, and poetry remains a key part of his creative output. This volume gathers selections from two distinct periods of Andrukhovych’s poetry. The first spans the 1980s through the early 1990s, associated with his involvement as a founding member of the Bu-Ba-Bu (Burlesque-Sideshow-Buffoonery) group of Ukrainian poets. This writing is characterized by openness, fluidity of structure, and an overall formal exuberance. After publishing only prose for a number of years, Andrukhovych returned to poetry in 2004 with a much-changed poetics with the collection, Songs for a Dead Rooster. These later poems represent a different Andrukhovych: older, well-traveled, moving from early exuberance to a more subdued, melancholic tone. Rooted in the autobiographical here and now, their voice is bold and fresh, open, fragile, and unaffected. Perhaps most importantly, Andrukhovych’s later poetry manages to combine, in a truly masterly fashion, the rootedness in all the problems, complexes, and neuroses of the post-Soviet/postcolonial double bind, in which Ukrainian culture finds itself, on the one hand, and the emphatic engagement with the processes of cultural globalization, on the other.

    Train Station


    here we long to board the right train

    following the maze of signs we hasten

    through cramped corridors between bundles and suitcases

    we don't have time to look up to where under the spherical vault

    hangs the dusty and dingy

    florentine chandelier

    we compress sweaty copper coins like springs

    we form disorderly lines

    above us a plaster wall-mounted putto from the 1910s

    sometimes blowing into his gilt horn

    we throw a glance at a bored blonde girl

    who eats an apple while leaning against a column

    finally we reach the platform

    impregnated with beer and roses

    we kiss someone we beg them not to forget we hesitate

    searching out the right seat

    until we release ourselves from the earth

    and softly depart

    soothed we look through the windows at the first trees

    turning yellow in the suburban woods

    Yuri Andrukhovych is a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator. His book-length works translated into English include the novels, Recreations, The Moscoviad, Perverzion, and Twelve Circles as well as a collection of essays, My Final Territory. A recipient of various awards including the Herder Prize (2001),

    Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize (2005), the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for European Understanding (2006), the Angelus Award (2006), the Hannah Arendt Prize (2014), and the Goethe Medal (2016). Andrukhovych lives in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine.



    Vitaly Chernetsky is an associate professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and director of the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007) and of numerous articles on modern and contemporary Russian and Ukrainian literature and film. He co-edited the anthology Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry (Talisman House, 2000). His translations into English include two novels by Yuri Andrukhovych, The Moscoviad (2008) and Twelve Circles (2015). 


    Ostap Kin published work in The Common, Poetry International, St. Petersburg Review, Springhouse, Trafika Europe, Ohio Edit, and in various anthologies. He has edited the anthology New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poetry on the City (forthcoming with Academic Studies Press). 




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