Poetry
Clarinets of the Sun
Сонячні кларнети
Pavlo Tychyna · 1918
Synopsis
Poems in which the groves resound like harps, where rain, bells and sun are heard more than seen, and where a young man's love passes through the music of words. Then the book darkens: in the tetraptych of the Grieving Mother, Mary crosses the fields of an Ukraine at war and sees a body blacken in the rye; a long poem raises over Kyiv, in the spring of 1917, a golden murmur in which the ancestors rise from their graves.
Context
The pieces, written from 1914 to 1918, were published in Kiev in the last months of 1918, in a thousand copies, by the Siaivo publishing cooperative; several were previously unpublished. The book was the subject of studies as early as 1919, including Andrii Nikovsky's Vita nova, and the style it founded, a distinctly Ukrainian form of symbolism, took its name from its title: clarinetism. A second edition appeared in 1920. Michael M. Naydan translated it in full into English in 2016.
Who it is for
Some sixty pages of short poems, followed by two longer sequences, the tetraptych on the Virgin and the poem on Kyiv.
Prizes and reception
The book that established its author's reputation, regarded as the summit of his work and as one of the great pages of Ukrainian poetry of the century.
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