endsongs
Endsongs is a book of losses. It marks the loss of the past (which has passed), of the present (torn apart by war and distance), of the future (as we imagined it), and of ourselves (who no longer fit within this precarious coordinate system). At the same time, endsongs are not only sung at the end of things, but also, sooner or later, end themselves. Hence, this is also a book of hope, of open possibilities and something unknown ahead. Once a loss has been marked through singing, the silence that follows gives birth to a new world and a new song.
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This poetry is acutely metaphorical and has a touch of surrealism. This is how the Eastern European presence-herein articulates itself. In her poems, Iryna Shuvalova discusses the art of loss and the art of giving in this part of the world where one’s footsteps get so easily erased. She traces the transitions between yesterday and tomorrow, documents the wounds – the loss of home, of past loves, of requisite words and forgotten memories. This is the voice of a woman who, from within her presence, from inside her body, knows that the giving is also the gain. By rebuilding her lost home, she cultivates her memory, heals her trauma, plants a garden, creates a new language, and reveals the meaning of what was lost.
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Tamara Hundorova
Reviews
The no-matter-what country is the country where poems, no matter what, get written. In these poems – today's poems, alive poems, poems burdened with bitterness and light – there are plenty of things lost and destroyed. The background for these poems is war – that is, loss. But what emerges against this background is, first and foremost, love – that is, hope.
The love of this book is like the deepest wound and the greatest asset, like the meaning of something that took place and assembled itself into words. The words of this book merge, helping each other to explain themselves, and testify to the insufficiency of the previous possibilities of language. Instead, a stubborn belief in rhythm calms one down and makes one join in the singing of these songs of ending, songs of transition.
The voice of this book is like an attempt to locate a loss; like a ruthless register of what has passed away and disappeared; a record of everything that the sea has taken away, whether it’s your home, your love, or your heart.
The heart of this book is elegiac through and through, reminding us that ‘the greater the love, the greater the price’. This is the knowledge that the sadness-girl and the sorrow-boy have learnt all too well. They learnt it, realised it, and now they are testifying.
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Serhiy Zhadan
In ‘Endsongs’, Iryna Shuvalova writes about things that are ultimate, inevitable, fundamental, as if she were rebuilding the very house of existence, testing the strength of every wordstone she finds, every love that has its price, every death that makes it impossible for us to live as if nothing has happened. This is the poetry of the great embarrassment and rethinking, of alienation and overcoming. In it, the language gets refracted through war and leads us into the most vulnerable place inside our memory, where previous literary codes no longer open the doors of things lost. There, the poet exists to verify and testify on how far we have walked away from our yesterday’s selves.
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Halyna Kruk
Iryna Shuvalova's ‘Endsongs’ is a poetry of external and internal landscapes, but above all, of naming and measuring the capacity of words. Shuvalova brings us back to the fundamentals of nature: grass, water, darkness – and to the foundations of our own selves: the pause between breathing in and breathing out, the clots of energy, the power of silent contemplation and the power of love. This is the poetry of a home lost and dreamt back into existence – the poetry that was broken into by the war. This is the history that ‘sleeps and dreams,’ and ‘there is no language that can fit all of this’. But Shuvalova invents this language.
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Oksana Lutsyshyna
What fills this book? Something dense, something igniting spontaneously from time to time, like volcanic magma. The words are necessary, ruthless. Sometimes they spill out like foam from a boiling pot, burning and unstoppable, and sometimes they lull and lure, arranged in an intricate pattern. But as soon as one takes a closer look at what makes up that ornament, one can’t help feeling uneasy... ‘Endsongs’ is a future classic. So it seems. Where does this feeling come from? Maybe from the perfect resonance of the voice and the time? Or, possibly, from the presence of some almost superhuman force that has extracted a voice from this time?
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Ostap Slyvynsky
This book is like a sea wave – gentle, but large and powerful. At first, you touch it joyfully; then it engulfs you completely, and you get uneasy; but in the end, you come out of it radically changed. In the constellation of contemporary Ukrainian poetry, which brings to the world so many new testimonies, so much new knowledge about how intensely the intimate and personal and the geopolitical are intertwined in these extremely difficult times, Iryna Shuvalova is one of its brightest stars.
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Vitaliy Chernetsky
Publisher: The Old Lion Publishing
Pages: 208
Language: Ukrainian
ISBN: 9789664482964