Iryna Shuvalova '14 Authors Poetry Collection

Deeply rooted in Ukraine's folk culture, Shuvalova's poetry re-mixes traditional spirituality with pulsating eroticism and an acute awareness of the natural environment. Presented in dual-language format, the poems in this collection offer a long poetic meditation on memory and life's natural cycles. Each word, like a life force, forms a connective substance that weaves between lines and verses. Though the wells are empty, Shuvalova's language overflows with rich images, corporeality, and a metaphoric sensibility that reaches across place and time and reverberates as a prayer against ancient stone.

About the Author

poems by Iryna Shuvalova • translated by Olena Jennings •

Iryna Shuvalova is a poet, translator and scholar from Kyiv, Ukraine. She has authored three poetry collections in Ukrainian—Ran, Os and Az—winning some of the country's top awards for poetry, including, in 2010, the first 1st place in the Smoloskyp Poetry Prize awarded in ten years. Her fourth book of poems is forthcoming in 2020 with The Old Lion Publishing House in Lviv. Iryna's translations from Ukrainian and Russian appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation and Words without Borders among others, while her own poetry has been widely anthologized in Ukraine and translated into nine languages beyond. In 2009, she also co-edited the first anthology of queer writing in Ukrainian translation, 120 Pages of 'Sodom.' In 2012, she was awarded the Joseph Brodsky / Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation. Having previously earned her MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College on a Fulbright scholarship, she is now a PhD student and a Gates Cambridge scholar at the University of Cambridge where she studies communities affected by the War in Donbas, Ukraine through the prism of war songs.