Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Editor’s Welcome

before being conscripted into the Soviet army. After his military service he worked for various newspapers and publishers and published his first book We Carry Love to the Planet in 1967. He was arrested in 1979 and spent a four-year term in Soviet prison camps and after that in Soviet psychiatric hospitals where authorities tried to break his health and spirit with psychotropic drugs. He was released in 1986, the day after the Chernobyl disaster After a long break, his next book Prince of the Dew appeared in 1990, the year before Ukrainian independence. Here we’re presenting 11 poems from him previously unavailable in English. 6 Poet, prose writer and essayist, Maria Matios (Марія Матіос, born 1959) has authored more than twenty books. Her novel Hardly Ever Otherwise appeared with Glagoslav Publishers in 2012 in Yuri Tkach’s English translation. I would compare Maria Matios’ masterpiece Sweet Darusya – generously excerpted in this issue – to the novels of Toni Morrison or Alice Walker in American literature. Like these two prominent African-American authors, Matios embraces her own family roots, to give voice to the past and

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