Café Review: Ukrainian Poetry of War and Hope; Anna Halberstadt and Philip Nikolayev, guest editors; Xpress, Portland, Maine, Summer 2024; 88 pages, perfect bound; single copy $18, one-year subscription $40.

Soon after Russia launched its military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there began to be reports from inside the country about how the people were coping with it. One theme was that the Ukrainians could barely process the fact that an invasion had even happened.

They knew Russia had forcibly, illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. They knew shooting had been going on since then in the Donbas region along the border with Russia. They knew Russian forces late in 2021 had massed along the border. But they did not think Russia would actually start a full-scale war. They thought of themselves as civilized inhabitants of the 21st century. The vast horrors of World War II were long past. Naked fascist aggression was a relic of terrible past mistakes, and would not be repeated.

They were living lives very much like ours. Some social and cultural differences, like language and disposition, but regular human routines and families, schools and workplaces.

When Russian bombs and missiles started to rain down on Ukraine’s cities and towns, Russian troops murdering and raping, not to mention shelling near nuclear power plants (these are facts, not cliches of hyperbole), it was practically unbelievable to many Ukrainians. Suddenly they found themselves in a fight to the death for their country and their lives.

In chaos there have to be, and always are, people trying to make sense out of it. Political, social, especially moral sense. Spiritual sense. Otherwise all is quite literally lost.

When Steve Luttrell, publisher and editor of The Café Review in Portland, recently encountered some Ukrainian poets and artists—people trying to make sense out of bewildering chaos—he tried to think of how to help. So he and the editors devoted the Summer 2024 issue of the 35-year-old publication to the works of 29 Ukrainians.

In the opening interview, well-known poet Marianna Kiyanovska offers the book’s most straightforward, incisive statements on the situation. “The war has changed me more than anyone could imagine,” she tells interviewer and translator Anna Halberstadt. To another question she responds: “I always catch myself thinking that there is a certain impossibility of imagining this war, imagining a person in this war. I can’t even imagine myself now. … The first half of 2022 was sanctified for many by the life-saving illusion that the war would not last long and victory would soon come. There was a lot of grief, but on the whole, almost everyone shared this illusion in one way or another.”

The war has now lasted more than 2½ years with no end in sight. The poems and visual artwork in the magazine disclose the range of emotions that go with it, confusing, intense, bitter, desperate, persistently seeking rays of light.

There is straight-up agonizing grief:

… the angels in the sky

are eating candies and drinking wine

as they weep

and weep

and weep

for the innocently slain

writes Igor Bozhko in “Butterfly.” And Pavlo Makedonskyi’s dark green and red watercolor “Sorrow Angel” offers a visual image of those angels.

Agonizing anger is rife: “tears and rage / tears and rage / tears and rage” Arkady Shtypel screams in depicting a funeral after an airstrike on a village. And on anger’s heels, desire for revenge: “there’s no need for metaphors / except perhaps this: / war’s most fiery hands / will close / around the enemy’s throats”.

War’s horror transforms you, but into what? “We’re so fed up with these / grimaces of medusa the gorgon / that it is easier to turn to stone already / and feel like nothing,” Iya Kiva writes, trying to work it out calmly, ending on the detached phrase “just not to go crazy”.

The confusion must be met head-on. Olga Bragina’s long lines, addressed apparently in some out-of-country safe haven to someone asking her what the war is like, lay it out: “no one here knows / what war is just as we didn’t before either / we saw war in movies but then we got fed up with the movies and wanted to watch / … something about the world of real things not shadows in a cave / something about a world where missiles didn’t fall out of the blue on people like in a bad / blockbuster thriller something about the actual world such that we could recognize it and / could speak with it in its own language not in the language of war”.

And surprisingly—or maybe not surprisingly—often, glimmers of hope appear, not shadows in a cave, but real light. The collection ends on Bozhko’s illuminating quatrains:

when a burst of bloody bullets rocks the town

the cuckoos inside their clocks just hunker down

little dogs run to basements to flee from peril

while a bottle stands unopened on the table

all the bullets avoid it with precision

they pursue other targets with ambition

now that everything is shattered in the cottage

shaggy shadows crawl the walls and on the low porch

but the bullets skirt the bottle gingerly

for the master bade it wait until victory

for he ordered it to stand firm and endure

homebrew sentry until the end of war

This issue of Café Review is not comfortable reading. And it’s not what you might expect either, because of the difficulty of imagining, let alone understanding, what the Ukrainian people are enduring now. But it is the harrowing real thing.

Copies are available through the magazine’s website or by writing to or visiting Café Review, c/o Yes Books, 589 Congress St., Portland, ME 04101.

Off Radar takes note of poetry and books with Maine connections the first Friday of each month. Contact Dana Wilde at dwilde.offradar@gmail.com.