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Book Review Abstract poems that fail to get under your skin

None of the poets in this collection reveal any understanding whatsoever of the politics involved or the context, writes JOHN GREEN

Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems
Edited by Julia Nemirovskaya
Smokestack Books £9.19

THE Russians have an admirable track record of anti-war poetry, based on the devastation its people suffered during the last century from the many invasions. I was therefore intrigued to hear about this new book of 100 anti-war poems from Smokestack which also has an admirable track record of internationalism in its publications list.

I was, however, seriously disappointed with this one. More than half of the poets represented live outside Russia or Ukraine, several in the US or Israel and the poems, by and large, reflect that distance.

Whereas earlier Soviet poets, just like our own WWI poets, knew first-hand what war was like and could express it viscerally in compelling and powerful imagery, in this collection the experience feels shred-bare and second hand, written at a distance; the poems are abstract and fail to get under your skin.

A good number contain archaic religious undertones and appeals to god.

It is a bi-lingual edition, containing only Russophone writers, even if several have elements of Russophobia, like this one by Olga Andreeva: “Beddy-bye, my child, lie still
Russian tales come out to kill. Turn the lights off in your alcove — Nighttime bombers prowl and rove, Ivan rides his horseless stove.”

Many, I found simply bathetic, like this one by Olga Levskaya’s “Peace in the sky and on earth below, peace in the village and the vale, pines in the forest peacefully grow.”

In her introduction, Nemirovskaya personalises the conflict, following the Western narrative. It is not a conflict about Nato expansion and a US proxy war but the doing of one tyrant: “Putin,” she writes, “began a ‘special military operation’.” And praises “those in Russia who withstood Putin’s omnipresent propaganda machine.

“These poems,” she explains, “came out of the Kopilka (piggy bank) project, founded in the US, “a place beyond Putin’s reach.” She ridicules Russian allegations of nazis in Ukraine (despite the official glorification Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and his worshippers the Azov batalion) and makes no mention of the continued shelling of the eastern and largely Russophone populations by the Ukrainian regime that has been a feature of this war since 2014 to this very day.

“This war devalues the glorious memory of the previous war fought by Russians against real Nazis ...” she says.

Russophone authors have experienced how their “language became an instrument of torture and aggression.” None of the poets in this collection reveal any understanding whatsoever of the politics involved or the context.

This line from a poem by one of the authors Herman Lukominikov is, I feel, very apposite for the whole volume: “My poetic lines, however well-styled. Never saved the life of anyone’s child.”

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