“Conversations Before Silence, The Selected Poetry of Oles Ilchenko,” by Oles Ilchenko, translated by Michael M. Naydan. London: Glagoslav Publications, 2017. 102 pp. ISBN: 978-1-911414-60-5 (paperback), $19.75.
Oles Ilchenko is a fascinating poet whose unique manner of expression translates seamlessly into the poetics of contemporary English. An avid reader of English-language poets such as William Carlos Williams and Stanley Kunitz, Mr. Ilchenko writes poetry that is associative, flitting and fragmentary. The language of his poetry has a tendency to collapse into itself, forcing the reader to reevaluate a word or a line or to reread a previous word to find the poet’s inner logic. This fragmentary incompleteness mimics the way human consciousness works without the filter of the written laws of sentences and grammatical structure.