Book record
Pray to the Empty Wells
Iryna Shuvalova
Translated from Ukrainian by Olena Jennings
Pray to the Empty Wells, by Iryna Shuvalova, is a poetry collection from Ukraine, translated by Olena Jennings, published by Lost Horse Press. It is a Ukrainian collection by Iryna Shuvalova where prayer, absence, water, and ecological-spiritual longing shape the poems. The title knows that emptiness can still receive address. An empty well may be failure, shrine, wound, or the place where the voice echoes back altered. I would read this first for the pressure of image and cadence rather than as a puzzle waiting for its correct answer. The useful description for a book like this should give the reader a door, not a lecture: enough context to orient the shelf, then enough mystery to let the poems keep their own weather. For this library, the book matters as more than a representative entry from Ukraine. It shows how poetry in translation can carry local speech, private intensity, and literary history into English without becoming merely informational.
- Publisher
- Lost Horse Press
- Language
- Ukrainian
- Country
- Ukraine