I read Oksana Maksymchuk’s poems in 2023 with astonishment. What a witness she is: the poems she sent were composed in a second or third language – in English, not her native Ukrainian, not Russian. When I heard her read in public in September 2024, I found her a vivid performer, careful, understated, self-effacing, so the poems foregrounded their dramatic befores and afters. I learned lessons about war poetry from an exposed civilian perspective. She did not display anger or dwell on politics. True and timeless, the poems stay faithful to their occasion in its immediacy. In Ukrainian, her tone, her un-rhetorical candour, would not have been tenable or, perhaps, tolerable to fellow Ukrainians. One poem stood out especially, ‘Rocket in the Room’, which begins:

what the rocket has in common
with the room full of children
is its current location

somebody thought the rocket
belongs in the room with children
and now it’s here

in time
someone else will come
and collect the pieces

of the rocket and of the children

The writing tends towards allegory, it requires engagement at the level of metaphor which then discloses the content. One reader, responding to the poems and interview in PN Review 272, said,

Maksymchuk’s account of the lasting effects of growing up under the Soviet regime of thought-control was chilling if not surprising. And then I reached this remark about the impact on her poetry of arriving in the USA:

In the tradition I chose to follow, you distinguish yourself and assert your uniqueness through a sort of technical mastery, which is fruitful and rewarding in its own way. By contrast, my English-language poetry is a form of storytelling, and its formal elements are subordinated to that purpose: to carry a story, to cast a spell.

There was something experimental and provisional about these poems written in another language, its distance from the events functioning as a kind of ironic filter that heightened without exaggerating the particulars. The reader responding to her poems said, ‘Storytelling maybe, but they are spare, disciplined, haunted. Clearly on the poetry side of the border. Thanks for […] this demonstration of how the landscape of poetry differs from the featureless terrain of prose.’

In her conversation with Sasha Dugdale (herself the source of so many unexpected energies in PN Review), Maksymchuk recounted how her war poems started ‘a year or two before the invasion’ – when Russia annexed Crimea – ‘in 2011–12’:

But then the actual war started, and I lost my voice. When I did pick up again, it was in English, and I was living in Ukraine. As warnings of the full-scale invasion started coming in from abroad, I wrote poems out of that anxious waiting, feeling out the contours of what was already taking shape, but was still mostly invisible, inconceivable. I had, by that time, co-edited an anthology of contemporary war poetry (Words for War, published in 2017), and for that we’d sifted through thousands of texts, out of which we selected just over a hundred. So I was attuned to what other poets in Ukraine have been doing, often spontaneously, without knowing much about world war poetry or about witness poetry; without any conceptual frameworks or significant examples to guide them. Often, war-time writing is highly expressive, emotional, bound to the terrible moment it bears witness to. Writing in English creates, for me, the illusion of temporal distance, which allows me to speak in a freer, more even voice. I’m still learning how to speak about difficult, liminal experiences – experiences that force us into the realness we’re all too ready to forgo for comfort or illusion of order – without distorting or flattening them into a clever artifice or a prolonged primordial scream.

‘I am still learning how to speak…’ For my part, I am still learning how to read and then hear her speech. When editing Still City: Diary of an Invasion, published this September, I took the poems in slowly. The author had feared the book was too long. I thought it the right length: reducing it would have impoverished it, there was such variety of engagement, such complex response, and the poet’s chosen language was negotiating with that complexity, finding unfamiliar idioms that were themselves unfamiliar ways of seeing (‘to see is only a language’, as Coleridge remarked in a cancelled line).

At first I believed the poems to be translations, but as I got closer to them I appreciated the character of their originality. ‘I think there is a patterning which issues not in a false upbeat but in a possibility,’ I wrote to her. The note stayed true. Only two or three poems were out of focus – too literary, too deviceful and deliberate, chasing a rhetoric which the English had left behind. At the end of my letter I wished the poet a happy new year. It was 4 January 2024.

The joy of including her poems in PN Review was compounded by the fact that just over a year after receiving her typescript her Diary was published.

The war continues.