The War & The Self in All Their Iterations: A Review of Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living

Halyna Kruk’s “Lost in Living,” translated from Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, immerses readers in the years immediately prior to the full-scale war in Ukraine. In these poems, nature thrives, and in a vein of poetry reminiscent of Bohdan Ihor Antonych, the natural world becomes a place of astute self-reflection. At the same time, the speaker’s vulnerability bends toward the melancholic, and romantic hints create a unique quest for survival told through mystical spells and serious meditations.

The dual-language collection contains a multitude of memorable poems. “creation of the world” is a sleek poem that offers readers a philosophical take on personal sacrifice. The speaker advises, “take a simple pencil / and cross out / all that’s not yours.” The brief lines mimic the act of crossing out “all that you can live without” and “all that you aren’t ready / to give up your soul for” and create a swift rhythm in the poem. Also reinforcing the speaker’s advice about what to consider and what to prioritize is the minimalist, sparse language. The images —”white on white,” “the hardest part,” “drawing on plain white”— are direct, and they bolster the speaker’s philosophical tone. Nonetheless, the poem develops a larger call to action—one that challenges readers to consider the consequences their individual actions have for the larger collective:

the hardest part
is drawing on plain white
with a simple pencil
without blackening
or contaminating it.

“Blackening” and “contaminating” hold negative connotations that juxtapose “plain white” and reiterate how easily one’s negative actions and intentions can tarnish an environment or situation.

“Lemko” is a fluid, gorgeous poem, but western readers may be unfamiliar with the ethnic group to which the title refers. Considered a Ukrainian ethnic group, the Lemko — until 1946 — lived in Ukraine’s most western part on both sides of the Carpathian Mountains and along the Polish-Slovak border. Historically, the Lemko population suffered mass deportation, and a distinctive Lemko identity remained dormant. The Lemko language is often a source of debate, with some linguists arguing that it is its own distinct language, while others argue that it is a dialect of Ukrainian. Nonetheless, Kruk’s poem offers the Lemko a genuinely beautiful recognition. The speaker acknowledges that “the distance between us heals” while alluding to the deportations that forced the Lemko from their native lands—”a land in which we’ll no longer live / not in any of its iterations, only mountains.” The poem segues into a moment of coexistence:

if only I hadn’t thought you were flint
if only you didn’t have to come down to people
how we would live in that winter den!

However, it is the poem’s conclusion that captures the resilience of the Lemko in countries like Ukraine and Poland: “and you fall into a rhythm / the spirit refuses.” These lines testify to a historic image of the Lemko that permeates literature and folk art — a people dedicated to the land that lived a life that translator Stephen Komarnyckyj describes as “unchanged for centuries.”

As Kruk’s collection continues, readers discover careful fusions of the natural world and the romantic one, such as the poem “freefall in love.” In this ethereal poem, the speaker relies on the natural world to convey their intense feelings for a mysterious “you.” The second stanza — which is also one of the poem’s most gorgeously written stanzas— conveys the speaker’s perceived inseparability from their beloved:

setting, the sun elongates our shadows,
lays them on top of each other
mixes them into one, and there’s no telling
where mine ends
or the one that is you begins—.

The lack of capitalization — one of Kruk’s trademark writing techniques — underprops the poem’s romantic sentiments. Lines such as “to walk along the edge of yourself / cut yourself off with Occam’s razor” create a dreamlike tone. However, the sense of freefalling forms in the final two stanzas as the speaker declares “I’m not holding on / I’m releasing my hands” and the surreal phrase “so many souls in the air” bleeds into the closing line “that even an apple has nowhere to fall.”

“We carry our dead” carries a nearly unbearable emotional weight when read in the context of the full-scale war in Ukraine. In this poem, the speaker testifies to a collective “we” that carries “our dead like children” with the acknowledgment that “none of us yet knew / it was so easy to die.” According to The Kyiv Independent, “Ukraine’s 2024 mortality rate is three times higher than [its] birth rate.” Thus, Kruk’s lines speak to Ukraine’s collective grief. The speaker continues: “for what should we tell their moms / what to tell their children / who will tell them the worst.” The speaker’s emotional tumult is full-force and captures the daily reality that the war has created of coping with loss and grief for nearly every Ukrainian. The poem concludes with the image of “a person” running to meet a bullet, and it ends with the phrase “the bullet hisses.” The poem’s lack of punctuation, but specifically the lack of punctuation and extra spacing in the final line, augments the closing phrase, giving it a haunting continuity.

“vyshyvanka day” captures the cultural and historic significance of one of the Ukrainian people’s most identifiable traditions — the vyshyvanka (embroidered blouse). As the poem opens, readers encounter a conversation between an old woman and the speaker:

“we recognized our men by their embroidery,”
the old woman next door told me
about those executed in forty-six.

“there was nothing else left to
recognize them by — a continuous wound.
each remembered her embroidery.”

These opening stanzas allude to 1946, the year after World War II ended, and also the year during which many of the central and western Ukraine’s inhabitants experienced a famine exacerbated by drought and wartime agricultural collapse. The wartime memories resonate with the heartbreaking images from areas like Bucha in which those killed by Russian occupiers were identified by jewelry and clothing items, if their bodies were recovered at all. The speaker offers a simple plea: “may we never have to / identify our own only by their embroidery” — an acknowledgment that Ukrainians do not want to relive their violent history.

“Lost in Living” is a deep examination of the self, the communities that influence and define that self, and the natural world. Each poem bears witness to the war, and Kruk champions a culture and a language once again under attack by imperial forces. In this book, Kruk offers readers one of the most important contributions to the Ukrainian poetry canon to emerge since the war’s beginning.

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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.

Copy editing: Joy Tataryn