The Metaphysical Poetry of Oksana Zabuzhko

18 januari 2006 At its best, the poetry of Oksana Zabuzhko is deeply meditative, weighty and dense, with an inwardly focused consciousness. Zabuzhko’s field of poetic vision constantly points beyond her immediately palpable world to probe the complex poetics of the metaphysical. The core of her quest comprises the need for illumination, which presents itself as a constant leitmotif in all her poetry as well as the central metaphor and title of her collection Conductor of the Last Candle (Dirigent ostannoi svichky; 1991). The visual orientation of her poetry, combined with its profoundly meditative quality on the backdrop of a reality fixed in time and space reminds one considerably of a poet like Boris Pasternak.

A myriad of manifestations of light – primary, radiant, reflected – occurs throughout Zabuzhko’s poetry. In the poem ‘Love’, where the pall of Chernobyl hangs over the city, “An evanescent bridge gently illuminates/ bare intertwined arms.” In another poem from Conductor of the Last Candle, she writes: “Momentary blinding despair will pierce me like a flash of light.” In ‘Autumn Melodies’ her persona appears “In a blinding white dress/ like a camera flash – amid the trees.” In the poem ‘The sweetness of words’ she writes: “A radiance flows through/ The contour that was one a body!” Mirrors, too abound in her poems, mirrors that reflect both a fragile world and a means for entering other realities.

This otherworld orientation predominates in Zabuzhko’s early poetry – not as a means of escape from reality, but as a means for illuminating the mystery of life. Both worlds are inexorably linked. Zabuzhko’s persona is the created as well as a creator. At times she functions as a white magic sorceress who manipulates language to create her poetry or to elevate her spiritual self into a transcendent realm. That intuitive clear-sighted understanding lasts for only a moment, but the effect of its power sustains.

In the poem ‘Just before Dawn’ Zabuzhko undergoes what we might describe as Shklovskian ‘estrangement’ (ostranenie), a kind of meditative out-of-body experience in the groggy pre-dawn state between sleep and wakefulness:



A moment of weariness – the dawn grew still, like the expression
Of suffering on a face, white as a hospital sheet.
God forbid that at this hour you look into a mirror –
You will not be there.
(But instead, in misty milk,
The guttural and dark rift of a corridor will appear,
And strange fires will float from there, from the depths . . . )
A moment of hesitation – it’s as though the lid of Pandora’s Box
Stopped dead for a second: nothing yet happened but it inevitably will,
Yet there is the ever-presence of weighty misfortune.
Objects, unsure of themselves, grope their own silhouette in the mist.
A moment of silence – the birds have yet to awaken,
And life on Earth seems threateningly different . . .

The “dark and gutteral rift of a corridor” provides an entryway into that transrational realm. The poet’s image fails to reflect in the mirror, because she hasn’t quite completely returned to the corporeal world. And the seemingly hostile world does not focus into clarity until the perceiver apprehends and interprets it into concreteness. A primordial silence prolongs the moment of deeper awareness.

The sonnet ‘Like a rear-view mirror . . .’ by means of memory establishes another Alice-through-the-looking-glass entranceway back to a formative childhood past. In Zabuzhko’s words:

Like a rear view mirror, adjust the image of childhood
With your hand – and grasp the directed rays:
Along the paths of the park where it is fresh, moist, shady,
You sink into the gravel – like an astronaut into a planet’s dust.

Sagging socks. A necklace made from mountain ash berries
Tinges the dress yellow. And with a thick milky coat
A tongue wraps around the first found higher truths:
I don’t want to die! . . . Nah – I won’t grow up!

In childhood we are the way fate makes us –
And suddenly that 4 1/2 year old sagacity
Overwhelms you with a grimace of pain.

There a little girl draws her tiny brows together –
You peer into her anxiously, waiting for someone to prompt you –
And dark alleys swallow this just created world.

The poet returns to that profound moment of the first understanding of pain and mortality within the context of a carefree fanciful youth. And the child in the poet teaches her a higher truth – how to transcend human mortality with the eyes of a child. Even though “dark alleys swallow this just created world”, the poet has received the one shining moment of epiphany.

The poem ‘The House of Creation’ is an impressive poem on the creative process, one that comes close to a Tiutchevian understanding of the nature of the abyss within the context of creative meditation. The process that she describes closely mirrors elements of the Spanish religious mystics St. John of the Cross and St. Theresa of Avila, as well as the English Metaphysicals. I have chosen here a literal translation of the title ‘Dim tvorchosty’, a house on the outskirts of Kyiv in Irpin where members of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union often would go to write. In Zabuzhkos words:

In this house it’s cold. At night
The wind roves and floorboards squeak,
As though someone is looking for the hidden keys
Of a treasure, marked by the blood of a child.

It’s frightening in this house. Here a drink chills
Instantly in a glass – to the sound of a rhyme –
Here by hopelessly mistaking the wrong door,
I am fearful of entering someone else’s life.

And a hot water pot falls from my hands,
For the pine trees moan like a woman into her pillow,
And from behind the wall the woodpecking knock
Of a frantically stubborn typewriter annoys.

O, my world, where can I go?
As though between lines, the window and the threshold,
Here I will grasp the measure of loneliness,
That loneliness which comes from – God . . .

Another chance is not given . . .
Blood passes the watermark on the paper.
Drink up the cold coffee like wine.
Get a key. And close the door forever.

The realia of the cold, windy darkness in the drafty nearly haunted house doubly deepens the poet’s fear and anxiety as she comes closer to reaching that state where the source of creativity lies. Her senses become heightened and magnified, attuned to every sound and sight, and her imagination becomes released. The physical doors are the doors to eternity, where she can “grasp the measure of loneliness . . . that comes from God”. Her journey is a rite of passage that must take her soul through the horror of peering into the unimaginable vastness of the universe and the feeling of abandonment that all metaphysical poets experience and describe. The door, however, is opened just for a moment, at the cost of deep emotional suffering. The poet discovers the hidden key, which she must return as she reenters the real world to her coffee, which has grown cold in the time it has taken to make her mental journey. The poet now has but one fear – that the door of inspiration will be closed forever.

The poetry of Zabuzhko provides just one of the many examples of the post-independence generation of Ukrainian writers who impact on world literature. I wholeheartedly agree with Stanislaw Baranczak’s conclusion that the contemporary poetry of Eastern Europe has much to teach and reteach the West, whose soma-orientation largely deprives it of a life of the spirit. There is a myriad of poetic talent in Ukraine – just waiting to be discovered by a wider, international audience.


Adapted by the author from the article ‘Two New Ukrainian Poets: Attila Mohylny and Oksana Zabuzhko’ in the journal Suchasnist’ in Ukrainian, No. 7, 1993. Reprinted in Russian in Respublika.