Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Conversations before Silence: The selected poetry of Oles Ilchenko

Conversations before Silence: The selected poetry of Oles Ilchenko

Ilchenko, Oles
Naydan, Michael M.

Paperback

Literary CriticismGeneral Poetry

Publisher Price: $23.99

ISBN10: 1911414607
ISBN13: 9781911414605
Publisher: Glagoslav Pubn Ltd
Published: Oct 12 2017
Pages: 104
Weight: 0.36
Height: 0.25 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

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.

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