The collective experience of pain: A review of Artur Dron’s book of poems ‘We Were Here’

All writers fortunate enough to publish their first book face the risk of never publishing a second. There are many reasons why a literary career might end at the outset, but traditionally, it stems from a writer’s crisis. An author might convey everything they wanted (and were able to) in their debut work and then find they simply have nothing more to say. Other times, the first book goes unnoticed by the general public or receives negative reviews, which may cause the author to lose confidence in their talent and stop writing. The opposite can also happen: A debut might be so overwhelmingly successful that the fear of failing to meet expectations prevents the author from continuing.

In Ukraine, following the full-scale Russian invasion, the writer’s crisis has been overshadowed by physical destruction as a top reason for the premature end of a literary career (sometimes before it even begins). This reality is well illustrated by the following lines:

Who never got to be heard

in our poetry world?

Who never made it

In the literary scene?

Whose working title and biography

are now crammed onto a grave marker?

This excerpt is from the poem “Ukrainian Literature,” which appears in “We Were Here,” the second book of poems by young Ukrainian poet Artur Dron. Published in Ukraine in 2023 by the Old Lion Publishing House, the book quickly brought the twenty-two-year-old author immense popularity. Within the first five months after its release, the entire five-thousand-copy edition sold out. Several poems were translated into European languages — Lithuanian, Polish, Italian, Finnish, Norwegian, and more — and a Swedish translation of 30 selected poems was published even before the original Ukrainian version. This achievement was part of a joint project by Ariel Förlag and Ellerströms Förlag Publishing Houses, with translations by Mikael Nydahl and Yuliia Musakovska.

But all of this might not have happened.

So, why do we need poetry?

In 2020, when Dron was only nineteen, his first book, “Dormitory No. 6,” was published. It won several literary prizes but remained almost invisible to readers. In 2022, when the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Dron became a rifleman with the 125th Separate Territorial Defense Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and decided to put his writing career on hold.

Later, in the afterword to “We Were Here,” Dron writes, “Why do we need poetry? I had no answer to this question for a long time. I said that I didn’t know… What to write when children are being pulled from the rubble? What order should I put the words in to reduce the pain?” Dron’s reflections on his disbelief in writing, writers, and the helplessness of the “old language,” as well as the need to find a new language, remind us of a similar moment in the history of literature. When the German philosopher Theodor Adorno proclaimed the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz, Paul Celan, an Austrian-Jewish poet from Ukrainian Bukovyna, proved (including to Adorno himself) with his poems, particularly in the collection “Poppy and Memory,” with the programmatic text “Fugue of Death,” that poetry is possible even after global upheavals, but not in its traditional form.

However, Celan’s situation has two significant differences from Dron’s. First, the classicist consciously and purposefully wrote in German, the language of the aggressor, because, as American poet and scholar Ilya Kaminsky — who hails from Odesa — writes, “Celan, however, chose to protest from inside German, in ‘death-rattling,’ ‘quarreling’ words.” Second, in Celan’s case, we are discussing texts created after the war, when the trauma had already occurred and entered the healing phase. Dron, on the other hand, writes in his native Ukrainian while the war against the Russian invader is ongoing.

Thus, in the afterword, he reframes the question: “Why do we need poetry in times of war?” He then formulates his own answer: so as not to be alone. He sees this as the meaning of literature and thus returns to writing — fortunately for the reader — because art in general, and poetry in particular, allows one to approach the impossible from a safe distance. The artist, or poet, serves as a mediator who determines how the inexpressible is conveyed and the degree of proximity to its boundary.

Dron is an interesting author with a unique worldview. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni seems to have recognized this as she quoted an excerpt from the first poem in the collection — a kind of epigraph outside the chapters — at a press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy:

Before you reach the line,

Cherish this Love

That grows like wild brambles.

Devotion of a sergeant,

a child, a dog.

The weeping

I can never weep out.

So how does Dron talk about war?

The need to clearly articulate the boundary experiences of war makes Dron’s poetic language as transparent and accessible as possible to the widest possible audience —unlike the aforementioned Celan, one of the most challenging poets in the world to read. At times, Dron’s vocabulary is vernacular and harsh, especially when referring to the invaders, as in the poem “Partisan Street,” where he writes, “A Buryat, such a scumbag.” Other times, his language is slangy, as in the poem “Misha”: “You say: I pissed myself, I can’t make it.” Military slang and terminology also appear from time to time, though how could they not in military poetry? And who would be surprised or disturbed by words like evac or machine guns, and mentions of dugouts, bulletproof vests, Kevlar helmets, or trenches? Moreover, the trench dirt and vivid naturalism — though not overly present in Dron’s work — are already familiar to readers of contemporary Ukrainian poetry, thanks to the works of other poets with military experience, such as combat medic Olena Herasymiuk (“Prison Song,” 2020) or Maksym (Dali) Kryvtsov, who died in the war (“Poems from the Loophole,” 2024 — the poet’s first and last book, aside from publications in various anthologies and almanacs).

The rejection of mysterious metaphors in favor of everyday life and descriptive literalism in Dron’s book is deliberate and conceptually grounded, as all the poetry focuses on ordinary people: the living and the dead, military and civilians, wives and husbands, parents and children. The image of children, incidentally, is one of the central, recurring themes in the collection, which is no surprise.

The Ukrainian edition of “We Were Here” is illustrated with drawings and quotes from children’s letters to the front, which, according to the author, supported him in the hardest times. This poetry is largely written as monologues by ordinary people, with the lyrical hero, who might be identified with the author, making rare appearances. For example, Dron’s poems include many names, and nearly all are titled such as “Ivan,” “Romko,” “Luka,” “Fedir,” “Valya,” “Kiryukha,” “Misha,” “Nastya,” or even “Pope John Paul the Second” and “Stus” (a famous Ukrainian poet who suffered under the Soviet regime). These names appear in the poems as characters with whom particular stories are connected.

A shared experience of trauma

The first chapter, titled “The Field of Mars” (another name for the Lychakiv military cemetery in Lviv, Ukraine), contains poems dedicated to the dead — primarily fallen soldiers. Here, for example, is the poem “Luka”:

Luka, Luka, Luka,

with your plastic arm.

You`re drifting far away.

Luka, Luka, Luka,

your daughter

will get your medal.

In the second chapter of the book, “Voices,” Dron gives voice to characters who have also endured the traumatic experiences of war and all its consequences — daily anxieties and fears, material and metaphysical losses, suffering, and pain — though they may not have directly faced death. In “Prayer,” we read:

With the swimmers, swim,

with the travelers, travel,

as they say in church.

With the one who was raped

and is expecting a child,

breathe, breathe, breathe.

Together, these “voices” form a collective “we,” and their individualized experiences create a troubled, yet hopeful, polyphony. Thus, in the poem “Children,” we read:

Here we rarely speak of hope

or patriotism

or the Motherland.

But when we speak

It is always about children.

Another example is The Izyum Communion:

These are our forests, and these are our crosses.

And these are the bodies

Broken only for us.

Now you see clearly:

we`re so much like your son.

Love is a person

In the third chapter, titled “The Beginning, The End, The Beginning,” which consists of only one poem — “The 1st Letter to the Corinthians” — Dron ends up where he started: love. Yet the love here is for humanity, not God, as one might expect from an author whose work is steeped in Christian motifs. It is love for the human in the highest humanistic sense, while also standing for the warrior who defends good in the eternal struggle against evil. Humanity is neither alone nor silent, because:

They say literature

is about words and the silence between them.

Ours now

contains more of the latter.

This is why the strategy of quietly experiencing pain in solitude is not what Dron offers readers of “We Were Here.” On the contrary, among contemporary Ukrainian military poets, he stands out for his desire to share the traumatic experience of war with all those who were forced to endure it. And for those fortunate enough to have avoided it, he brings his words close to the impassable line, though still at a safe distance.

The British publishing house Jantar Publishing is releasing an English translation of the book, translated by poet Yuliia Musakovska with support from the Ukrainian Book Institute as part of the Translate Ukraine 2024 support program. This means that Artur Dron’s poetry will continue to fulfill the role he envisioned — now with English-speaking readers outside Ukraine: to transcend the boundaries of loneliness.

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The publication is a part of the “Chytomo Picks: Classics and New Books from Ukraine” project. The materials have been prepared with the assistance of the Ukrainian Book Institute at the expense of the state budget. The author’s opinion may not coincide with the official position of the Ukrainian Book Institute.

Team of authors: Dmytro Zozulia, Oleh Kotsarev

Copy editing: Terra Friedman King