Review of Oksana Maksymchuk’s Still City, Diary of an Invasion
By Sarah Montin
“Are they there yet?” is the question haunting Oksana Maksymchuk’s debut collection in English which chronicles the period just before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Exiled in the US since the 1990’s, author of two poetry collections in Ukrainian and the celebrated co-translator of Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk and The Voices of Babyn Yar by Marianna Kiyanovska, Oksana Maksymchuk returned to her hometown of Lviv just before Russia launched its “special operation” on 24th February 2022. Poised for war, Maksymchuk’s poetic Diary of an Invasion is frozen in the expectation of violence, hushed in the anxiogenic stillness of “things to come/waiting to be unwrapped” (When a Missile Finds a Home).
“Snow is a strange white word” wrote British war poet Isaac Rosenberg as he learned of Great Britain’s entrance in the war in August 1914 and witnessed the winter of the world closing in: “Ice and frost and snow / From earth to sky / This summer land does know / No man knows why” (On Receiving the First News of the War).
More than a hundred years later, the cover of Still City, featuring snow-laden roofs against a white sky and a drone-like bird frozen mid-air suggests in the same manner the looming Homeric “white ruin” of war under the false serenity of snow. It also materializes the force lines that shape the collection (and perhaps war poetry in general) – namely the symbolic and formal dialectic between stillness and movement, expansion and concentration, abstraction and figuration…
Close Encounters in War 