Maksym Rylsky (1895-1964) is one of the most outstanding Ukrainian poets of the the 20th century and master of the genres of the modern sonnet and the long narrative poem. He was closely associated with the Neoclassicist group of Ukrainian poets, who employed traditional poetic forms with rhyme and meter, wrote in a clear and accessible contemporary idiom, and often referenced Ancient Greek and Roman mythology as well as numerous other authors from world literature in their poetry. Rylsky was...

Ukrainian poet Attyla Mohylny (1963-2008) died prematurely at the age of 45. He completed his philology degree at Taras Shevchenko Kyiv State University and worked mostly as a teacher, editor and journalist during his abbreviated lifetime. He authored two books of poetry early in his career: Tumbler Pigeons above the Rooftops (1987) and Contours of the City (1991) along with the text for the exquisitely illustrated children's book Mavka and the Ant King in 2006. He continued to work on writi...

"God hath denied me that angelic measure / Without which no man sees in me the poet," writes Zygmunt Krasinski in one of his most recognisable lyrics. Yet while it may be true that his lyric output cannot rival in quality the verses of the other two great Polish Romantics, Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Slowacki, Krasinski's dramatic muse gives no ground to any other.

The Glagoslav edition of the Dramatic Works of Zygmunt Krasinski provides the English reader, for the first time, with all of...

Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine on 24th February 2022, author and poet Alexander Korotko began to set down as poetry the turbulent responses at the emotional, philosophical and simply human levels evoked by the resulting war. Thus, we read in the 88 poems in this volume – completed in just less than 100 days – of the seemingly endless wail of sirens; of sheltering in cellars and tunnels; of the celebrated Ukrainian steppe, churned by tanks; the dead – “our killed, have become our Sa...

Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584) is not only the greatest Polish poet before Adam Mickiewicz, he is also one of the great figures of the European Renaissance. Over the space of his rather brief life, he excelled in every literary genre he attempted: secular lyric poetry and religious hymns, drama, pithy satires in the vein of Martial, and translations from both the Bible and classical literature. While being the first major voice to shape the modern idiom of Polish, he also wrote in Latin, for w...

"It would be hard to imagine Russian poetry in the last half century without Lydia Grigorieva," writeseminent Russian poet and critic Konstantin Kedrov. Grigorieva is a uniquely individual voice, bucking the trends of modernist poetry to create her own distinctive and beguiling body of poetry.Her work draws on her own remarkable life to create startlingly arresting images and metaphors, full of beauty and power, from her series that emerged from her Arctic childhood, to the troubles that bese...

The year 2022 has been designated the Year of Romanticism in Poland. An even two hundred years have passed since the first publication of Adam Mickiewicz’s Ballads and Romances — a collection of lyrics which has the same significance for Polish literature as Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads has for the English. Poems of love, the supernatural, and the exotic, Mickiewicz’s first volume of poetry achieved a level of sublimity that immediately set him at the head of all Polish ...

A Burglar of the Better Sort offers, in the English translation of Charles S. Kraszewski, the entirety of Czyzewski's surviving literary output, from surrealistic plays like Donkey and Sun in Metamorphosis and his inimitable 'formistic poems' through the playful Christmas 'pastorals'...

Only a handful of prominent émigré Ukrainian poet-scholar Bohdan Rubchak’s poems have appeared in English translation prior to the publication of this volume. Rubchak died in 2018 at the age of 83 after publishing six collections of poetry, the last for which he received the prestigious Pavlo Tychyna Prize in Ukraine in 1993. Rubchak was part of the extremely talented displaced generation that escaped from the traumatic experiences of World War II to find a new life and creative inspirati...

A passionate intensity moves through the subjective, intimate voice of the poems of Natalka Bilotserkivets. Through translation, Subterranean Fire continues their mysterious pilgrimage to their second lives. From one of the true inheritors – touchstones like Anna Akhmatova, Gabriela Mistral, and Louise Bogan – the poems of Bilotserkivets inhabit us as they include us in their transcendent borderland.

– American poet James Brasfield

With great depths of feeling, Natalka Bilotserkivetsâ€...