Review by Peter Raynard of "Still City: Diary of an Invasion" by Oksana Maksymchuk

There has never been a time of global peace; the nearest was the two hundred year Pax Romana (Roman Peace) at the crossover into the Common Era. Today sadly, after millennia of technological and social progress, wars still abound, whether in Sub-Saharan Africa, Myanmar, or Gaza, Syria, Yemen of the Middle East. Then there is the Russian invasion of Ukraine over two years ago and its continuation of almost WW1-like trench conflict, where unknown thousands of young men die in combat at the whim of the autocrat Putin.

The Polish American poet Czesław Miłosz criticised a vein of poetry that divorced the poet from society. Urging a poetic that was witness to history (which for him was the dehumanising effect of Soviet totalitarianism in Poland post-World War Two), he called it the Witness of Poetry, not ‘because we witness it, but because it witnesses us,’ inferring that because of his experience in Eastern Europe’s upheavals, he is both witness and citizen.

Oksana Maksymchuk is also both witness and citizen. By being so, the urgency and historicity of Still City: Diary of an Invasion (with no daily dates), punches the reader with each entry. There are many dimensions within the experience of modern warfare, for example being both a land war and a digital war.

Friends of friends have died
on the front line
locked up in cellars
buried alive
in their own beds

We mourn them online

There is a deep ricochet of disbelief in what is happening, not knowing how long it will last. Separation is a key theme throughout: ‘he sends a picture of his classroom, desks / abandoned in haste.’ The normality of the past is a haunting in the present, which changes the nature of time (another key theme): ‘was it / years or days ago / that we read our poems / in an underground gallery?’ Life becomes subterranean, so you lose sight of what is going on.

Of course death is ever present, in reality and fiction.

Some say it didn’t happen
others that it was staged
corpses from the morgue
laid out
for an exhibition

In the poem ‘Blank Pages’, she references Hegel’s ‘History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.’ History is thus reduced to either a blank page marking peacetime, or in this case filled pages of horror and destruction.

So you cling to the idea of the old normality, when the present is trying to erase it, replacing it to the point where the invasion becomes ‘the unspeakable.’ So we must be glad that Maksymchuk, as witness and citizen, has spoken, and filled these vital pages of history.

About the Reviewer
Peter Raynard is a poet, and editor of Proletarian Poetry: Poems of Working Class Lives. His latest collection is Manland (Nine Arches Press, 2022). His debut poetry pamphlet, The Harlot and the Rake: Poems after William Hogarth, and academic essay on the poetry of Fred Voss and Martin Hayes, are both forthcoming in 2024.

Review by Laurie Cusack of "Kyiv Trance" by Gus Gresham

Beautifully researched − Kyiv Trance is a stone-cold classic − Brilliant in its execution − Gresham's crime thriller is truly mesmerizing  −  Utterly unputdownable − Outstanding!

Blah, blah, blah … How many times have you read over-hyped blurb like this? Too many, I know, but this text is the real deal … honest to god, cross my heart and hope to die!

For starters Gresham’s subject matter couldn’t be more topical. Everyone wants to know about Kyiv now – our sympathies go out to Ukraine in all its adversity. Moreover, there is a hunger to be better informed about its people, culture and way of life. I think we all agree there’s no better way to satisfy that hunger than racing through a sizzling page turner!

Gresham’s atmospheric opening, for instance, draws the reader right into the subterranean bowel of Kyiv: "Richard was riding the improbably long escalators again. From deep down behind him, he could still hear accordion music and the husky voice of the old busker in the strains of a Slavic folksong. It wasn’t necessary to understand Ukrainian to know that the song was about tragedy and loss."

Throughout razor-sharp Kyiv Trance you glean an understanding of Ukraine’s unique Orange Revolution, which was bloodless-civil disobedience after the fraudulent elections of 2004/2005. Gresham, skilfully, sprinkles and captures the zeitgeist moments of a nation that was on the cusp of democratic change, during that tumultuous period. 

The impressive juxtaposition of a maniac on the loose, as this political turmoil is  unfolding, reads very well. Alongside this, Gresham’s haunted protagonist Richard Farr battles to make sense of it all after falling head over heels with beautiful Nadya. There is a lot going on within Kyiv Trance but as a reader you are never lost, as the seamless flashbacks and back story are handled deftly.

They also say good writing is about how you handle detail − keeping your ear to the ground is paramount − Kyiv Trance royally delivers on that score: "Bar Zavtra’s music system was playing Ella Fitzgerald. ‘How Deep is the Ocean?’ Her voice had to compete with the shopping-centre Muzak – some soulless atrocity that sounded like a panpipe rendition of Motorhead’s ‘The Ace of Spades.’"

I was reminded of Martin Cruz Smith’s dynamic thriller Gorky Park to some extent as I read Gresham’s text − both plots are set in the east and are meditations on political power whilst examining the social fabric close-up through the lens of the crime thriller genre. Both highlight how systems work and how people strive and survive within those systems. Kyiv Trance is a blast and brilliantly observed.

About the reviewer
Laurie Cusack (PhD) studied Creative Writing at Leicester University. He writes from the gut − from the underground − about the underdog. His collection of short stories The Mad Road is out in September. He is now an actor-simulator, writer and community advocate.

You can read more about Kyiv Trance by Gus Gresham, as well as an excerpt from the novel, on Creative Writing at Leicester here.