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Resilience, transformation, memory

Nucleus: A Poet’s Lyrical Journey from Ukraine to Canada
by Svetlana Ischenko

Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2024
$18.95 / 9781553807070

Reviewed by gillian harding-russell

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In Nucleus, Vancouver-based Svetlana Ischenko’s lyrical journey from her birthplace in Ukraine to Canada is rendered in language rich with evocative detail, often applying synesthesia in which one sense is seen in terms of another. While all the poems in the book engaged me, I was particularly drawn to the formal intricacy of the introductory sonnets, “A Banner of Cloth,” translated from Ukrainian, where meaning is not lost but perhaps enhanced in translation. As a first collection, Nucleus is a fine collection that demonstrates a virtuoso poetic sensibility.

In “A Banner of Cloth,” we are transported with the speaker, a stage actor in association with Ukrainian folk figure Maria-Marusia, from her homeland in Ukraine to western Canada.

Ukrainian stamp that features Marusia.

In this finely wrought sequence, last and first lines of consecutive sonnets are interwoven so that the sequence is formally strung together. In the finale sonnet, Ischenko brings together the first line of the first sonnet with the last lines from all the preceding sonnets to create a structure to contain the chaos of emotion.

Looking up Mary-Marusia, I discovered that she is depicted with geese on a Ukrainian stamp almost as she is presented in the first sonnet, with an important difference that the “geese” that merge with “her arms” are raised toward “guns”:

A woman lies down on a banner of cloth.
The way both Marusia and Mary grieved –
she lifts her arms in lament like geese
scattering in the sights of guns.

With the speaker’s homeland at war, and she an émigré, a separation of the Ukrainian “Marusia” from the more Canadian-sounding “Mary” dramatizes a division in the speaker’s self or “nucleus”—a coinage rendered poignant and most pertinent in the title poem “Nucleus.” The heroine’s situation as metaphorically splayed out on a “banner of cloth” with a wide geography between oceans is memorable and moving in its implicit iconography. 

Secular drama as well as political are compressed in this impressionist sequence when the figure of the poet-speaker appears “on stage” in “the shame of earthly love,” while her body is represented in terms of a landscape, with her eyes, “lakes” and her hair “weeping.” In this haunting and tantalizing sequence, love and life as well as death feature with mystical fervour: “I wait for my meeting with Death / in a body that holds the weight of the sky.” Ischenko reminds us that, not unlike war, the act of giving birth invites the possibility of death. 

For this string of sonnets, Ischenko in the introduction tells us that she first wrote the poems in Ukrainian and then translated them into English, and that for the later poems she wrote the poems in “fledgling English.” The latter poems are characterized by a free-verse style that, while less formal, are no less shot with the speaker’s emotion—be it nostalgia for the sound of rain that her mother woke her and her brothers to hear on the verandah (“Listen to the Rain”) or to her memory of her fortune-telling Ba or grandmother (“Magic for Ba”). 

Author Svetlana Ischenko

In “The Familiar Fragrance,” the speaker smells the scent of pine trees between “North Vancouver and downtown” and is reminded of the fragrance of her grandfather’s pine coffin as past homeland and present abode merge in her memory. A magical quality associated with the strength of his spirit emerges in the following lines: “My grandmother had told me to open the doors and windows / because his soul is so strong — / it could split a window frame and fly away to freedom, she explained.”

With surreal suggestion, the long lines dramatize the erratic strong wind, and a similar storytelling propensity is characterized in the later lines when her grandfather’s memory is evoked by wine bottles that uncork themselves in the basement, and that leave the speaker with a magical knowledge about how to make wine.

Also large in her memory is her grandmother with her Ukrainian storytelling, card playing, and fortune telling. In “Magic for Ba,” the speaker memorializes her grandmother who took care of her while her mother was at work. “She would point to a cloud and say God / was sitting right behind it,” and while playing “her crazy card games,” she “shook the money wallet at the young moon like a witch, / never cut her hair at the dying moon, / and showed me Cain killing Abel on the surface of the full moon.”

Later we learn the speaker cared for her diabetic “Ba.” Her granddaughter learned to sterilize “the scary steel needles / and syringe” to measure “the exact dosage.” There is love and laughter in these poems about remembered old ones who shaped the speaker’s self and identity.

A similar mythopoeia appears in “Nucleus,” which features both an eight-year-old Sachi Komura Rummel who was protected by a tree during Hiroshima (and bore two healthy daughters as well as surviving to eighty years), and the speaker herself:

I was a sixteen-year-old student surrounded by classmates
on the fourth floor of Mykolaiv School Number Thirty-eight 
breaking, splitting into atoms, and radiating
through the shining April sun, where I hold fairy dust
within my ‘fourth wall,’ and through my name,
which means ‘light’ …

Transformed from charcoaled radioactive material to “fairy dust,” the scene with the speaker’s exposure turns into one of magic while she, like the eighty-year-old Japanese woman, has survived with “three healthy children”—though we can only conjecture to what “miracle” she refers that “the future Earth will / hold within itself.” Perhaps that “miracle” refers to a personal hope or a more public one, such as for peace and the end of war in Ukraine. The reference to the “fairy dust / within my ‘fourth wall’” applies to her acting, and the association of her name with “light” suggests a birth destiny carried by her name. 

Nucleus is a poignant collection, entertaining and full of whimsy and magic as well as reflecting the dearth of the speaker’s situation as an émigré from war-torn Ukraine who finds love and life and beauty in her newfound Canada, and reaches a kind of personal redemption.



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gillian harding-russell

A poet, editor and reviewer, gillian harding-russell has published five poetry collections, most recently In Another Air (Radiant Press, 2018) and Uninterrupted (Ekstasis Editions, 2020), both nominated for Saskatchewan Book Awards. Also, The Alfred Gustav Press released a chapbook Megrim (2021). Her work has been published widely in literary journals across Canada, most recently in Queen’s Quarterly and The Fiddlehead. She lives on Treaty 4 territory. [Editor’s note: gillian harding-russell has written about collections by Donna Kane, Diana Hayes, Susan McCaslin, Marlene Grand Maître, and Ian Thomas in BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie


Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster

One comment on “Resilience, transformation, memory

  1. gillian harding-russell’s review of Svetlana Ischenko’s Nucleus is excellent. She delves into both the images and themes of the poems as well as the nuances of Ischenko’s craft. For example, she points out Ischenko’s use of synesthesia. When analyzing Ischenko’s “finely wrought” sonnet sequence she notes that “the last and first lines of consecutive sonnets are interwoven so that the sequence is formally strung together.” In addition, she goes to the heart of this volume:Ischenko’s life in Ukraine and Canada.

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