Apricots of Donbas

By Lyuba Yakimchuk
Translated By Max Rosochinsky, Svetlana Lavochkina & Oksana Maksymchuk

Lyuba Yakimchuk’s Apricots of Donbas, translated from Ukrainian by Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky, and Svetlana Lavochkina, was composed amid the turmoil of the ongoing war that began with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Despite claiming “there’s no poetry about war / just decomposition,” simile flows out from the trauma of displacement and at times these poems border on magical realism: “the sea hardens into salt / the grass hardens into coal / and father turns like feather grass / gray.”

Yakimchuk’s descriptions of prewar Donbas flirt with the language of an industrial Eden: “this town with unkissed pavements / and unkissed maidens / could not fall.” Throughout, there is a pleasant blurring between landscape and body, and these poems are full of transformations. In “the terricones of breasts” the speaker says, “I wash the coal / like I’d wash my braids” and in “my grandmother’s fairy tale” we are transported to a different time:

when tears
turn to rock salt
when the sea in the stomach
turns into a coal mine.

Adding to Yakimchuk’s linguistic alchemy is her use of biblical scaffolding, as if she were imploring some higher being to “forgive us our destroyed cities”; elsewhere, the speaker observes that her father has “turned into a pillar of coal.” 

In addition to its exploration of the strains of war, these poems also reach for reprieve, in anticipation of “the return”:

we will walk back, even with bare feet
if we don’t find our home in the place where we left it
we will build another one in an apricot tree
out of luscious clouds, out of azure ether

Here, “we don’t simply find a home but face the challenge of making it,” as Maksymchuk and Rosochinsky note in their introduction. Also included in this book is Yakimchuk’s essay “Reaching a Common Language,” which surprises with personal details (“a militant from the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic chose my parents’ house as his new domicile”), offering helpful context that allows us to see what words shaped into poems have the power to restore.

Purchase