How Fire Descends

A searing testament to poetry’s power to define and defy injustice, from iconic writer-activist Serhiy Zhadan

Since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan has brought international attention to his country’s struggle through his unflinching poetry of witness. In this new selection of poems, forged entirely in wartime, Zhadan honours the memory of the lost and addresses the living, inviting us to consider what language can offer to a country threatened with extinction. Young lovers, marginalised outsiders, and ordinary citizens pulse with life in a composite portrait of a people newly unified by extremity. Even in the midst of enemy fire, Zhadan’s lyrical monuments beat with a subterranean thrum of hope.

This selection of Zhadan’s poetry, written between 2014 and 2022, includes approximately forty poems from Zhadan’s collections published in Ukrainian, as well as eight new poems published online. With a foreword by the poet Ilya Kaminsky, How Fire Descends is an homage to the Ukrainian people, a forceful reckoning with the violence of the past and present, and an act of artistic imagination that breaks with trauma and charts a new future for Ukraine.