The Country Where Everyone's Name Is Fear: Selected Poems by Boris and Ludmila Khersonsky (review)

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• The Country Where Everyone's Name Is Fear: Selected Poems by Boris and Ludmila Khersonsky
• Kathryn Weld (bio)

the country where everyone's name is fear: selected poems
Boris and Ludmila Khersonsky
Edited by Katie Ferris and Ilya Kaminsky
Lost Horse Press
https://losthorsepress.org/catalog/the-country-where-everyones-name-is-fear-selected-poems/
126 pages; Print, $20.00

In 2017, Lost Horse Press established a dual-language series of poetry by important contemporary Ukrainian poets. The Country Where Everyone's Name Is Fear, by Boris and Ludmila Khersonsky, edited by Katie Ferris and Ilya Kaminsky, is the ninth volume in this series. These poems remind us of the role of the poet during times of war, in the particular context of the Ukrainian struggle for independence.

The reader will remember that the Russo-Ukrainian War is now more than a decade old, having begun after the Revolution of Dignity (February 2014), which ousted the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, and overthrew the Ukrainian government, and was immediately followed by the Russian annexation of the Crimea. During the eight subsequent years, Russia supported separatists in the Donbas region in armed conflict, naval attacks, and cyberwarfare. In February 2022, while Lost Horse Press was preparing for the book release, the war entered a phase of major escalation with the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia. The poems in The Country Where Everyone's Name Is Fear bear witness to nearly a decade of war.

The English portion of this dual-language publication is lean, featuring [End Page 106] only fifteen poems by Ludmila Khersonsky and fourteen by Boris Khersonsky. Nevertheless, this sampling is more than enough to reveal the stark desperation of current times in Ukraine, where "explosions are the new normal, you grow used to them / stop noticing that you, with your ordinary ways are a goner." There are hints that this myopia is a human condition, even when a people are mired in crisis: "against the background of lies, it's not apparent that we're also liars."

How to describe this, and what is the weight of that role as witness? Ludmila, in "How to Describe," tells us:

a man who turned to the wall, weary of war.Ear of the war: so much noise from a single man,as if a whale was birthed into a common shell,as if fear was trapped in the heart's punchbag.A lonely human is dust.Where to run from dust?

An award-winning lyric poet and translator, Ludmila Khersonsky was born in Moldavia. She has published three volumes of poetry, a fourth is forthcoming from Arrowsmith Press. Her husband and coauthor, Boris Khersonsky trained as a neurologist, practiced medicine in Odessa, and taught clinical psychology at Odessa National University. While they write on similar themes, they are stylistically distinct: Ludmila's work attends to the lyric and personal, while Boris's brings a historical perspective and cultural context.

When Boris learned for the first time, as a young man in his thirties, that forty-two members of his family had perished in the Holocaust, he began writing poems on the lives of these lost relatives. In a 2015 New York Times interview he said it was only with perestroika that publication became possible. Family Album, published in Moscow in 2006, made him famous.

As a member of the samizdat movement, which disseminated alternative, nonconformist literature in the USSR, by the time of the fall of the USSR, Boris had published many volumes of poetry written in Russian. Widely respected and translated, at the time of the invasion of Ukraine in 2014, in an act of solidarity, he renounced the use of his native Russian in favor of Ukrainian. [End Page 107]

Language and its loss is a theme for both poets. The title poem, by Ludmila, admonishes:

Blind Feet. No looking back. Nolooking back. If you look back, my brave:if my brave, you look back, my brave: you say nothingwhen you arrive to a new destinationthey will learn nothing from you: they will learn what nothing is.

On the same theme, Boris writes:

I read with an accent and I can't open...