Olena Boryshpolets is a writer, poet, journalist, and culture manager. Like many Ukrainian creatives, when the full-scale invasion began in 2022, Boryshpolets went to Poland, where she worked with other Ukrainian women to inform European audiences about the war. Her poetry collection, Orpheus and Eurydice in New York, might be overlooked in the ever-growing canon of Ukrainian literature available to English-language audiences. However, it should not be. In its depiction of how the war has upended the everyday existences and familial ties of Ukrainians from the Black Sea to the Carpathian Mountains, it is just as important as collections like Oksana Maksymchuk’s Still City. In its portrayal of resilience, fortitude, and the Ukrainian ability to maintain a sense of homeland even when one is separated from it, Orpheus and Eurydice in New York is just as significant as Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living.
‘My brother’s rabbits’ is one of the initial poems where an invader’s brutality encroaches on the peaceful, everyday existence of innocent bystanders and citizens. It opens with the observation, ‘When he slaughtered the rabbits / the Russians were already bombing us.’ The slaughter of the rabbits coincides with the ongoing bombing of innocent Ukrainians by Russian forces, as though one act of violence forms a chain reaction and triggers another. The poem is, essentially, a depiction of the chain reactions of war. A mother refuses to leave her home, let alone take shelter in ‘anybody else’s basement.’ Saboteurs are shot in the speaker’s neighbourhood, and life continues as the speaker says they and others were ‘decorating the basement / in a desperate way.’ The speaker portrays the rabbits’ slaughter as almost sacrificial, an act taken in order preserve the lives of others. The rabbits’ slaughter is a representation of the sacrifices many individuals made not only to protect their homeland of Ukraine from foreign invaders, but also to protect one another from the invaders’ threats and violence.
As the war continues, Ukraine continues losing innumerable and irreplaceable civilians, children, artists, writers, and musicians. Each and every loss impacts Ukrainians across the globe differently. ‘No one has taught themselves to mean more than death’ attempts to seize and define what loss, grief, and death ultimately mean to Ukrainians as the war continues. The poem opens with the speaker’s observation ‘The Ukrainian year stretches on the road to winter / in a black sky.’ The word ‘stretches’ and the phrase ‘the road to winter’ create a sense of endlessness. The speaker continues: ‘There is enough antiaircraft fog for everyone / and for all the untrained and for a piece of bread // The war gathers those who are pressed by their land on their chests.’ These lines embody the war’s collective consequences and how it is an experience shared by Ukrainians everywhere. As the poem continues, the speaker asserts, ‘you can remember your childhood in the middle of a game / and the value of things / far from a real shotgun.’ The evocation of childhood memories implies a return to innocence, a yield to time’s unstoppable progression, and the myriad of ways war reshapes an individual and their life. However, the speaker does not give in to hopelessness or the threat of death’s eternal vastness. Rather, they embrace hope and resilience: ‘every surviving house / will mean / more than death.’
The collection itself has a cyclical tone, and as it concludes, poems like ‘Lost’ augment that tone. In ‘Lost’, the natural world and city life collide as the speaker observes four deer. One of the poem’s most memorable lines is the second line: ‘the dazzling beauty of the lost filled us.’ Though the line ultimately describes the deer’s presence in the city, the line is applicable to the refugee experience of entering a new country and a new culture temporarily or permanently. The speaker describes repeating ‘all the usual mistakes’ and ‘scaring each other and looking for salvation / in every living thing / in ever foolish hope.’ A sense of fearful wonder permeates the poem because the speaker sees their existence mirrored in the deer. They describe the deer’s fate as ‘unknown to any of us’, and ‘winter comes for those lost on the way to their home’. Again, winter serves as a powerful setting in the poem. Its darkness, its coldness, are perhaps representative of the speaker’s emotional and mental state as they navigate the challenges of being a refugee in a foreign country. A sense of fleetingness develops, as though the speaker recognizes that their current situation is not their permanent one.
Set against the world’s fragility and Ukraine’s fight for survival, Olena Boryshpolets’ bilingual poetry collection Orpheus and Eurydice in New York (Poets of Queens Press, 2024) is a journey into the harrowing separations war creates from nature, from homeland, and from oneself. Boryshpolets’ verses utilize images from the natural world and city streets as they attempt to navigate an everchanging realm of emotions, everyday existences, and socio-political conversations that determine the fates of not only individuals, but also landscapes and animals, affected by the war. Translated by Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko, these poems establish a new poetic architecture in which the brutality humans inflict on one another fuses with the saving grace inherent in the smallest of interactions between humanity and nature.
Reviewed by Nicole Yurcaba
ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE IN NEW YORK
Written by Olena Boryshpolets
Translated from the Ukrainian by Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko
Published by Poets of Queens (2024)
June 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.
Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, New Eastern Europe, Euromaidan Press, Chytomo, and The New Voice of Ukraine. Her poetry collection, The Pale Goth, is available from Alien Buddha Press.
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