The Many Names for Mother by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, and: Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Many Names for Mother by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, and: Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk
• Duane Niatum (bio)

the many names for mother
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
Kent State University Press
https://www.kentstateuniversitypress.com/2019/the-many-names-for-mother/#:~:text=Julia%20Kolchinsky%20Dasbach&text=The%20Many%20Names%20for%20Mother%20is%20an%20exploration%20of%20intergenerational,they%20reflect%20on%20the%20past.
112 pages; Print, $17.00 apricots of donbas
Lyuba Yakimchuk
Translated by Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky, and Svetlana Lavochkina
Lost Horse Press
https://losthorsepress.org/catalog/apricots-of-donbas/#:~:text=Apricots%20of%20Donbas%2C%20by%20award,in%20a%20dual%20language%20edition.
166 pages; Print, $24.00

It is an honor and a pleasure to introduce to you two of the major contemporary Ukrainian poets. The current situation in Ukraine has brought me out of my book review retirement. Writing this review is the least I can do for fellow poets facing one of the worst crises in modern history, an unprovoked war that is a threat to their individual lives and an attempt to wipe out their culture and history.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, author of The Many Names for Mother, is a poet of origins, ancestry, memory, and language. These are the central motivators for the poems in her provocative and heart-wrenching lines revealed concisely with concrete detail. I am able to get closer to these poems and their personal [End Page 100] and historical revelations because of watching the news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that is now more than a year old.

And like other notable Ukrainian poets and novelists, she honors her family's history that she brings into the present moment. She does this, she says, because she cannot move forward without this important part of her memory, dreams, and potential future. And, of course, her life is brought into focus in the way her words explore the journey her life has taken. But most importantly, this life is anchored to the many names for mother, as the title of her collection points to.

This is a passage from her poem "Inheritance":

And in that distance, who can telligniting times apart? The differencebetween the lived and the passed down:the sundials shadow at noon? I'm wishingagain today still last night—in flux like sand and water and ancestry.

We see how Kolchinsky Dasbach's story flows on like a river of memory and will never be lost or forgotten. She is a poet who leaves no stone unturned to face the reader. Take this opening passage from "Other Women Don't Tell You," which speaks of her son:

the next day will be harder.He will cry morehaving learned what it meansto be apart. He will cling to youlike soaking clothing, and onceoff your body, he will becomea fish wrenching backtowards water, your facea fresh lake, his mouthgasping to drink.

Underneath these lines is the threat of danger, the machine of war and destruction and pain that she and her people have lived with for so long. It is [End Page 101] as if the truth determines the speed and flow of her blood and soul. This is poetry with blood on its hands and memory of darkness that refuses to reach light. In "Inheritance," for example, we are bound to feel our own sense of family and inheritance. Who hasn't fought to regain the presence of a great-grandmother and her eternal gaze that hints the stars are ancestors?

The lineage of motherhood, she says, is best understood and appreciated when it goes back for generations. She is lucky. This lineage goes back quite a ways for her. Even a great-great-grandmother is shown to play a key role in the poetry she creates. Yet her own personal story began when she was born in 1987 in Ukraine, still part of the Soviet Union, and she came to the United States as a Jewish refugee at age six. The poems here are peopled by generations of women, brought to life in sharp, lively detail and image. The power and vividness of the imagery is evident in...