Songs for a Dead Rooster

Songs for a Dead Rooster presents a selection of poems by Yuri Andrukhovych, one of contemporary Ukraine’s leading writers. While Andrukhovych is well known internationally as a novelist and essayist, his recognition in Ukraine was first as a poet, and poetry remains a key part of his creative output. This volume gathers selections from two distinct periods of Andrukhovych’s poetry. The first spans the 1980s through the early 1990s, associated with his involvement as a founding member of the Bu-Ba-Bu (Burlesque-Sideshow-Buffoonery) group of Ukrainian poets. This writing is characterized by openness, fluidity of structure, and an overall formal exuberance.

After publishing only prose for a number of years, Andrukhovych returned to poetry in 2004 with a much-changed poetics with the collection, Songs for a Dead Rooster. These later poems represent a different Andrukhovych: older, well-traveled, moving from early exuberance to a more subdued, melancholic tone. Rooted in the autobiographical here and now, their voice is bold and fresh, open, fragile, and unaffected. Perhaps most importantly, Andrukhovych’s later poetry manages to combine, in a truly masterly fashion, the rootedness in all the problems, complexes, and neuroses of the post-Soviet/postcolonial double bind, in which Ukrainian culture finds itself, on the one hand, and the emphatic engagement with the processes of cultural globalization, on the other.

Volume 2 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Series. Bilingual Edition.