Couplets from the frontline

To say there has been a renaissance of poetry in Ukraine is an understatement. Not since World War I has there been anything approaching the quality and quantity of work by poets who are also combatants. Civil society has reciprocated, with packed-out poetry readings in the bomb shelters of frontline cities and initiatives including the Ukrainian Culture Ministry’s Poetry of the Free portal, which has had over 43,500 submissions since February 2022.

Ukrainian war poetry does not make for comfortable reading. Indeed, right now it speaks in the most ancient and primal forms of prayer, testimony, rallying cry and curse. Amid the noise of geopolitical news, commentary, disinformation and social media hubbub, it returns insistently to the most important element of all: people.

As the celebrated poet Maksym Kryvtsov wrote in his collection Poems from the Trench: “When people ask me what war is, I will answer without hesitation: names.” Kryvtsov was himself a machine-gunner who had been defending Ukraine since before the full-scale invasion. He was killed by a Russian shell in January 2024, mere days after the publication of his first and last book.

There are too many Ukrainian poets of great significance to name, yet for now two represent the Ukrainian poetic renaissance: Yaryna Chornohuz and Artur Dron.

Both poets have served their country. Chornohuz is still a drone operator of the Ukrainian Marine Corps in the frontline city of Kherson. Dron signed up in February 2022, four years before he reached the age of conscription, and is now a veteran following serious injury. Both have seen their poetry published in English, French and other languages, and have won major literary awards in Ukraine.

Chornohuz’s poetry and life are interwoven with defending Ukraine against the existential threat of Russia. Her writing also offers lament and testimony. Her poem The Fruits of War draws on her experience as a combat medic dating back to 2019 and beyond. It is a cry not to let lives of immeasurable value lost on the battlefield slip into oblivion, despite everything:

I harvest fruits of war that may grow into myths

but are unlikely ever to blossom in memory into more than one

overlooked flower

at least to my half-useless

witness,

in the end, they’ll always be squeezed into oblivion.

for the fruits of war are losses

unseen and forgotten by all but

a few witnesses.

Dron quotes the lines about unseen and forgotten losses in his book of essays, Hemingway Knows Nothing (2025).

The poetry of Dron, Chornohuz and other Ukrainian war poets offer a powerful form of commemoration that may be all the more universal for being so intensely individual. The First Letter to the Corinthians, the final poem of Dron’s collection We Were Here (2024), speaks of the love that animates his choice to defend Ukraine:

Love never fails.

But where there are prophecies, they will cease;

where there are tongues, they will be stilled;

where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

Because sometimes when the shelling ceases,

friends close love’s eyes,

wrap it in sleeping bags

and carry it away.

And then it passes on

to the living.

The young men in Dron’s company all loved an older soldier — their medic, Oleksandr “Doc” Kobernyk — who they saw as their teacher.

In Hemingway Knows Nothing, Dron returns repeatedly to a story of the time their position in a strip of forest came under sustained Russian shelling. Disorientated with an internal brain injury, he seeks out Doc only to learn from his commander that he has been killed. Tasked with evacuating his body and lacking a stretcher, he gathers him up on a sleeping bag. While Doc’s body is still warm, the poet experiences a love radiating from his teacher.

The day Doc’s wife Olena learned of his death, she wrote a poem. Reading it unlocked Dron’s own writing, which had been halted at that point by the war.

If we choose to pay attention, Ukrainian war poetry in translation may pass to us at least some of the love and the memory of what truly matters. Poetry, language, culture and identity are essential matters of security for Ukraine. For those in relative safety beyond Ukraine’s borders but nevertheless facing the menace of Russia, the time may have come, like Ukraine, to take inspiration from our poetic traditions.

Even if, as the poet Alfred Tennyson once wrote, “we have been made weak by time and fate”, we may yet still find ourselves “strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”.

The poems in this article were translated by Amelia Glaser with Fiona Benson and Hugh Roberts (The Fruits of War), and Yulia Musakovska (Letter to the Corinthians).