Lyudmyla Diadchenko’s Magnetic Storms (Магнітні бурі), translated by Padma Thornlyre and printed by the micropress No Reply, rounds out this year’s Sealey Challenge for me. It is a beautiful volume: beautiful both in construction, thanks to No Reply, and in content, thanks to Diadchenko and Thornlyre.
This came to Kickstarter right after Russia invaded Ukraine. It’s a hell of a time to bring forth a volume of Ukrainian poetry, and No Reply pulled it off. The poetry, meanwhile, is a striking mix of beauty, humor, and faith. This reads like poetry of COVID-times, but Diadchenko brings a light touch here: she’s carrying us through a world of horrors, to be sure, but she’s doing it with grace.
The poem which gives this collection its title, and which starts it off, is funny and sly and tender, mixing emotion and grief and relationships with the changing of the seasons and the baking of bread:
July has left behind a few magnetic storms, / And you have left me with a few new neuroses. / I knead the bread of August to make it rise whole, / I knead your tracks when you follow new roads.
Magnetic Storms, much like this first stanza of its first poem, brings the magic of the quotidian forward, showing us God in the ducks, djinn in the electric kettle, magic in other alphabets and other holy books. It’s impossible to read these poems without thinking of Ukraine right now, torn apart by a brutal imperialist war. Moments that might have been wry, before, feel almost horrifyingly percipient now.
Magnetic Storms begins with a poem about July’s magnetic storms bleeding into the bread of August. Diadchenko closes her collection with a poem about the spiders of fall, redecorating houses getting ready for winter:
You return after a tedious journey / To a house redecorated in predictable ways by spiders. / The old lodgers took off — you need remind no one / That every summer races by, as every winter overstays / Its welcome. Spring can’t refrain from waving her hand.
There’s nothing predictable about Magnetic Storms. It’s funny and clever and beautiful, the sort of layered poetry that will be as new and fresh with every re-read as it was with the first.
I truly hope to read more by Diadchenko in the years to come.
Essentially a Nerd 