“WHERE POETRY COMES FROM”

This is what power really is: the privilege of ignoring anything you might find distasteful. —Oksana Zabuzhko

“Language, any language,” observed the young poet Oksana Zabuzhko, “is the capital love of my life” because “nothing else has the power to synthesize music and myth, two things without which the world would be a totally unlivable place.” It’s a credo to which Zabuzhko has remained faithful across time, even as the young poet evolved into the mature fiction writer, polemicist, and activist who is without doubt the most influential literary figure in Ukraine in the last half century.

“You’re not really a woman,” reads the epigraph to Zabuzhko’s Clytemnestra, immediately underscoring three central aspects of the poet’s work. First, she’s an inheritor of the Western literary tradition, grounding many of her poems in classic texts she then transforms into counternarratives. Here Clytemnestra and Ophelia finally speak for themselves. Elsewhere, she lets us know she’s read the same fairy tales, studied the same Hebrew origin stories, the same Greek myths and Roman history, along with the British classics, as have her counterparts around the world. Moreover, she’s translated not only Sylvia Plath and Derek Walcott but also the poems of contemporaries such as Marie Howe and Lucie Brock-Broido into her native Ukrainian.

Then there’s the epigraph’s implicit feminist subtext: Clytemnestra is indeed a woman—Helen of Troy’s sister, in fact—and she’s primed for battle. Initially it appears she might reject conventional male nostrums while heralding a muchneeded assault on the old order. Blade in hand, awaiting her husband Agamemnon as he climbs the stairs, Clytemnestra imagines a different role for herself: “It would be a hundred times better to run off with some pilgrims, / Say, to Delphi, and become a priestess.” But it’s too late for that. Preparing to murder her husband,