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Praise for The Venus of Odesa

Compassion and irony define the human predicaments and historical conditions in Askold Melnyczuk’s extraordinary new collection of poems that spans nearly fifty years. His cosmopolitan perspective—one that twines Ukraine and New England—probes time and death, and the relationship between the tragic and the comic with a nimble wit that humanizes. These poems shake you up in the most important ways that poetry can.

—Peter Balakian, author of Ozone Journal, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry

When I heard that Askold Melnyczuk had finally collected his poetry written over the past fifty years, I thought, High time! Now those who know him as a superb fiction writer, a tireless advocate for Ukrainian and American writers, a publisher who publishes books for the sole reason that he loves them, and a gentle scoffer at all things/people/causes that are bloated on their own self-importance, will get to see yet another side of his literary genius. As lyrical in feeling as they are rigorously made, these poems are a brave and bracing attempt, in Yeats’s phrase, “to hold reality and justice in a single thought.” At the same time, he knows that his father seeing a rose window in a yogurt cup or a refugee losing his teeth on the ship to so-called “freedom” can’t be shrugged off as epiphenomena, the merely personal, the clod-consciousness of “a potato reading Rilke.” Wised up, amused, disabused, deeply felt, these poems have always taken the potato’s side, the side that stays rooted in the earth no matter what self-righteous abstractions or large-scale truths seem to hold sway at any given moment. Grounded in history, in atrocity, and in a rare sweetness and generosity, his poems are the exuberant record of a truly humane way of being in the world.

—Tom Sleigh, author of The King’s Touch


The Venus of Odesa, Askold Melnyczuk’s new and selected poems, is both a debut collection and the harvest of a lifetime. Youthful and wise, intimate yet eternal in voice, he is a keen recorder of the sweep of history as well as the sweep-hand of time’s layered implications. In “The Enamel Box,” he writes; “I imagine / a mother, a father, a child a house: / eternal actors, paramours of joy and pain, / except the child, born all eyes, / who sits at the window / watching dragonflies / and does not know / centuries are passing. / This is how they pass.” Sometimes rueful, sometimes stinging, always deeply humane, these poems of heritage, family, and friendship are dear to the heart as they toll the heartbeat of our moment. Askold Melnyczuk is among the best poets of his generation.

—Stuart Dischell, author of The Lookout Man