“Conversations Before Silence, The Selected Poetry of Oles Ilchenko,” by Oles Ilchenko, translated by Michael M. Naydan. London: Glagoslav Publications, 2017. 102 pp. ISBN: 978-1-911414-60-5 (paperback), $19.75.
Oles Ilchenko is a fascinating poet whose unique manner of expression translates seamlessly into the poetics of contemporary English. An avid reader of English-language poets such as William Carlos Williams and Stanley Kunitz, Mr. Ilchenko writes poetry that is associative, flitting and fragmentary. The language of his poetry has a tendency to collapse into itself, forcing the reader to reevaluate a word or a line or to reread a previous word to find the poet’s inner logic. This fragmentary incompleteness mimics the way human consciousness works without the filter of the written laws of sentences and grammatical structure.
Mr. Ilchenko was born in Kyiv on Octorber 4, 1957. He lived in Kyiv most of his life, traveled extensively and now resides in Switzerland with his wife. He received degrees from the Drahomaniv Kyiv Pedagogical University and the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. He is the author of 22 children’s books, the novels “City with Chimeras” and “My Beloved Kyara” and a book of memoirs, “Collectors of the Mists: Subjective Notes from a Life in Kyiv.”
His seven books of poetry include: “A Wintry Garden,” “Constellation AS,” “A Different Landscape,” “Pages,” “Cities and Islands,” “Conversations Before Silence” and “Certain Dreams, or A Kyiv Which Is Not.” He also writes film scripts and is the author of numerous articles on cultural issues.
The translator, Michael M. Naydan, is a Woskob Family Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Pennsylvania State University.