Chair’s Report

NAWE NEWS

Chair’s Report

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Andrew Melrose, Chair NAWE

Director’s Report

When social media timelines fill up quickly with screenshots of poems, you know that something momentous has taken place. And so it was in late February 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Among the distressing scenes of people fleeing, there were screenshots of poems: Wisława Szymborska’s ’The End and the Beginning’, Czeslaw Milosz’s ‘A Song on the End of the World’, and a number of poems from Ilya Kaminsky’s ‘Deaf Republic’.

In April, Kaminsky himself shared an image of people planting purple and yellow pansies in what looked like a roadside flowerbed in Kharkiv. The image had originally been posted on Twitter by a Ukrainian media organisation, with the caption (in Ukrainian) roughly translated as: ‘Kharkiv is heroic, that’s for sure but also surreal, as always.’ Kaminsky’s post numbered the bombardments and the dead, ‘Today: bombardments in Kharkiv,’ he said. ‘4 people died. And yet, these good folks are planting the flowers on the street corner.’

Luck and pansies. Heavy artillery and street corners. Someone will have to clean up, and