Poetry as Testimony: Reflections on War in Kateryna Kalytko’s Texts

Kateryna Kalytko’s latest collections – Nobody Knows Us Here and We Don’t Know Anyone (2019), The Silent Women’s Order (2021), and People with Verbs (2022) – are all centered on understanding the current war, although the poet had previously addressed the issues of comprehending war and the experience of migration, particularly with a focus on the Balkan context. However, these last three collections can be seen as forming a conceptual unity: their main characteristics include the transversality of symbolism and key imagery, the recurrence of certain plots, and the construction of a vertical mythological narrative. At the risk of broad generalizations, the central concerns of Kalytko’s recent poetry revolve around language, memory, and the female experience of survival. In this context, the relationship between space, body, and language is especially distinctive in Kalytko’s work. Her attention to the loci that constitute the landscape parallels a specific conceptual strategy in her poetry that might be described as the anatomy of language. Thus, language itself is likened to a landscape — one with a non-homogeneous structure and a distinct profile. This atomization, the decomposition of linguistic fabric into its elements — sounds and letters, parts of speech, intonational accents — is similar to the creation of a map that records meaning in a bodily, tactile way. The real dividing line between the pre-war and wartime reality is language — its capacity to adequately reflect this new reality. The new language is grounded in the verb, which assumes all the consequences of rejecting moral hypocrisy. The reconfiguration of language under the pressure of wartime realities is also intricately connected to collective memory.