Since February 2022, Ukraine has lived under open sky, exposed – to missiles, to grief, to the grinding dailiness of war. Unsheltered Beneath the Sky is Oles Ilchenko’s poetic reckoning with that exposure.
Written in the aftermath of invasion, these poems do not flinch. A woman orders a taxi to the military cemetery. A soldier dies near Bakhmut and speaks to the love he left behind. A child asks whether there will be school – and air raids – in the new place. Cassandra is raped in Irpin and killed again in Kherson, and still she returns. The dead sit at an empty table with sand in their cups. A father writes home to say he perished, and apologizes for it.
Ilchenko brings to this work the full weight of a literary life rooted in Kyiv. His register shifts fluently between elegy and lyric meditation, between intimate address and collective witness. Some poems are almost unbearably specific; others reach toward myth and silence. What unites them is a refusal to look away – from the body in the rubble, from the woman who feels nothing after her husband’s death, from the clay moon that turns out to be only a reflection in a frozen puddle, from the air raid alert that follows the relief.
This is not poetry that aestheticises suffering. It documents it, inhabits it, and insists on the full human cost of what has been done to Ukraine.
Unsheltered Beneath the Sky stands alongside the most necessary war literature of our time.
