Winter King

Author: Ostap Slyvynsky

Translators: Vitaly Chernetsky and Iryna Shuvalova

Publisher: Lost Horse Press (2023)

Winter King by Ostap Slyvynsky presents a selection from a decade and a half's worth of work by one of Ukraine’s most prominent contemporary voices in poetry. Slyvynsky is the poet of everyday things. He writes of children’s games, old trees, and family stories. Yet, what emerges from under his pen is the portrait of an era. His writing, simultaneously delicate and unflinchingly incisive, like a surgeon’s hand, always probes for the bottomless depths gaping behind the mundane. Perhaps the greatest of Slyvynsky’s gifts as a poet is his ability to examine individual voices and memories for traces of larger historical events without ever trivializing the former in the face of the latter. His spare, lean poems unearth a complex and layered human reality that is both universal and strikingly, almost painfully, rooted in the landscape that birthed it, be it the poet’s family home in the Carpathian Mountains or the Maidan Square in Kyiv, aflame with revolution. Slyvynsky’s remarkable attention to detail results in strikingly beautiful and enigmatic texts that invite multiple re-readings, each peeling off yet another layer of reality. However, what always remains at the core after these layers are stripped off is the poet’s profound humanity. Drawing on three of Slyvynsky’s earlier poetry collections, this volume also includes some of his most recent poems­—arguably, among the poet’s best.