Conversations before Silence: The selected poetry of Oles Ilchenko - Hardcover

Ilchenko, Oles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1911414615 ISBN 13: 9781911414612

Publisher: Glagoslav Publications B.V., 2017

Synopsis

An avid reader of English-language poets such as William Carlos Williams and Stanley Kunitz, Ilchenko is one of the best Ukrainian poets writing in free verse today. His poetry is associative, flitting, and fragmentary. At times he does not form complete sentences in his poems and links words together into phrases before shifting into another thought or idea. The language of his poetry has a tendency to collapse into itself, often forcing the reader to reevaluate a word or line, to reread a previous word to focus on the poet’s inner logic. This fragmentary incompleteness and permeability mimics much the way human consciousness works without the filter of the written communicative convention of sentences and grammatical structure. This “slipperiness” and rapid shifting of voice comprises one of the essential invariants in Ilchenko’s poetics. The poet also flaunts many traditional poetic Ukrainian conventions. Like ee cummings he tends to avoid capital letters or punctuation such as exclamation points. One will find only commas and dashes for pauses, and an occasional period in his poems, which do not always end with the finality of that punctuation mark. In doing this, the poet often suggests a fragment or slice of his life broken off on the page and to be continued at some point in time. He is a fascinating poet whose idiom and unique manner of expression translates seamlessly into the poetics of contemporary English.

About this title

About the Author

Ukrainian poet, prose writer, children's author, culturologist, and filmscript writer Oles Ilchenko was born in Kyiv on October 4, 1957. He has lived in Kyiv for most of his life and traveled extensively to numerous other countries. He has spent the last several years living 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 twenty-two children's books, the novels City with Chimeras (2009) and My Beloved Kyara (2011) and a book of memoirs of the 1970s-1990s, Collectors of the Mists: Subjective Notes from a Life in Kyiv (2017). His seven books of poetry include: A Wintry Garden (1991), Constellation AS (1993), A Different Landscape (1997), Pages (2004), Cities and Islands (2004), Conversation before Silence (2005), and Certain Dreams, or A Kyiv which is Not (2007). He also writes film scripts and is the author of numerous articles on cultural issues. His favorite pastimes include traveling to different countries, swimming, and experimenting with the creation of various culinary dishes.

About this edition

• Publisher: Glagoslav Publications B.V.
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1911414615
• ISBN 13: 9781911414612
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 104