Poet Bill Arthrell's "Ukranian Heart: The Land This Tortured Beauty Through the Eyes of an American Poet"

 

By chance, I found a beautifully moving book of poems at the library while browsing a shelf of local writers; the poetry collection is titled, Ukrainian Heart: The Land, This Tortured Beauty, Through the Eyes of an American poet. I have been reading a poem a day all October. Or sometimes two, when the poems are extremely short. I end up re-reading the intro and back pages of the author's background story probably about every three poems or so--meaning every few days. The sentiment in this book is sweetly sad, sadly intense, and real. It seems to be not contrived for any sake of commercialism; in fact, these poems did not come out and about this year in 2022 during Putin's Russia's current war on the Ukraine that we keep seeing on the news and dropping tears over as more bombs and bullet shells are 

dropped; these poems are the result of many years of many wars on the beautiful bread basket of Ukraine, as it seems most everyone has at one time or another coveted its grain. 

I was so surprised to find this book and then see that it was published in 2019. Arthrell is pictured on the back cover posing with two Cossack fighters in Ukraine, which he felt inspired to visit on account of the Maiden Revolution. Arthrell is a retired high school history teacher from Cleveland, Ohio, local to me and the local library because Cleveland is a one-hour hop and skip and jump down the road East from me and the state's Huron Public Library. He is also pictured on an inside page of the book standing with "The Holodomor Girl" which stands at the Holodomor Victim's Memorial in Kyiv, Ukraine. The name means, "Death by Starvation." The Ukrainian people were forced to starve. Any real-life girl or person would be shot to death for holding the five stalks of wheat the statue holds and be blamed for "theft," Arthrell explains. Ten million Ukrainians were starved to death deliberately in 1932-33 and also by Russia two other times, in 1946-47 and back farther in 1921-22. At the time of the publication of this book Russia was invading the Ukraine much as it is now. 

In Part One of this book, the poet shares his experiences in the Ukraine, which he portrays as a land of great beauty such as of the "farms so large--/so much bigger/than dreams," he describes in the very first poem in a "Rapid Gallop/to the horizon/where eternity begins" (p. 16), where the large farms lead to eternity. 

I remember a day when my daughter was little, an afternoon in which my husband and I finished digging and tilling a new backyard garden, one that was rather large for our large-enough yard; our kindergarten-age daughter ran to the middle of the garden, exclaiming, "Oh, Mommy, this is just like a dream!" She was filled with glee over how big it was under the sun above and all the things we would grow in it. That is how the poem I described above, called "Ukraine" made me feel in regards to its large farm image.

Part Two of the book is called "A Nation of Survivors" and the poems in it discuss the horrors of war and the dead, yes, but then those that survived. Those that survived, survived in cities of streets lined with "veins and marrow" (p. 66) like concrete sorrow into the hope of a

better tomorrow. Part Two is filled with historically political facts about all the fighting for the land of the Ukraine and the Ukrainian people's  frequent dire struggles. Time and time again, they have had to defend themselves against other nations wanting to take them over, such as, we now know, Russia, though also "the Mongol Horde, to the Ottoman Turks; from Poland to the German Nazis" (p. 120).

Part One is a nice, easy read; Part Two is a tough read for those who feel others' pain. How could one not become empathetic, however, after reading these poems, how could the terribleness of what some humans do to other humans not be felt when you read about children being killed? What mother or father or sister or brother or grandmother and grandfather can read these poems and not cry? 

Yes, I have been reading one poem a day.  

Source

Arthrell, Bill. Ukrainian Heart. 2019. ISBN #978-617-7777-43-3.