By Stephen Smoot
“Let us not dare to attempt the definition of poetry, nor answer the question what it is,” wrote Walt Whitman on the topic of his vocation. The Philadelphia native combined great patriotic pride, simple and elegant prose, and a sometimes controversial sensuality to his globally-respected work.
For poems can comfort and inspire, or they can call out the gap between what is and what ought to be, or what is and what should never be. Something of all of this emerges in the work of Ukrainian-American poet Nicole Yurcaba, Resident of West Virginia – Citizen of the World.
Yurcaba has published two collections of poetry, the first relating back to the singular event that created a dividing line of “before” and “after,” the “special operation” of the Russian armed forces that has pounded away at her country’s territory and has threatened its very sovereignty ever since.
She shared that one of her published collections “was one poem written for every day of the war.” In these versus are not “a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel,” but the pain of a stranger in a strange land, struggling with a new place, a different culture, and people who even when expressing compassion do not truly understand her country’s story. All the while continually processing for years the ever changing face of the struggle that continues in Ukraine.
“I come from a Ukraine family,” Yucaba explained, “but I have lived in Hardy County for many years.
Few Americans have a grasp on Ukraine’s history. The Primary Chronicle shares its version of its origins, when the people in and around the region of Kyiv (the Russian language version of the name is Kiev) declared “our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it.” They prevailed on three Varangian (Viking) brothers to organize their land and rule justly over it. The Kyivan Rus, as it was known, is the cradle of the later three nations of Ukraine, Russia, and Belorussia.
Mongols sent by Kublai Khan and his successors annihilated the Kyivan Rus just as it had established civilization standards well ahead of that time’s Anglo-Saxon England or Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire. A papal ambassador reported a few years later of fields filled with the skulls of their victims and bemoaned the loss of the city’s famously elegant churches and other structures.
Russia tried to erase the nationalist aspects of Ukraine during its imperial period ending in 1917, imposing its own language and mores to the point that the text of the native language disappeared from use. The late 1800s saw academic interest worldwide in the preservation and promotion of culture, leading to a revival of the use of the Ukrainian language and the restoration of that nation’s literature and national feeling.
Ukraine had a brief period of independence as a German satellite in the closing years of World War I. The Russian-dominated Soviet Union never forgot what it saw as perfidy and Josef Stalin reserved a special punishment for the dedicated and hard-working prosperous peasantry of Ukraine. Take their land, take their farms, force them to work as near-serfs on land that Imperial Russia had grudgingly given when they were freed in 1866. The farmers resolved to destroy all they had to keep it from Stalin’s hands, ate what they could of their crops and livestock, and burned the rest.
Stalin’s revenge killed tens of millions. Some Ukrainians joined the Germans when they invaded in 1941, only to see National Socialist hatreds visited on them as eagerly as against Russians and Jews. Ukraine would not taste freedom again until 1991 when it, Russia, and Belorussia seceded from the Soviet Union and became independent states.
Vladimir Putin, likely driven in part by the quickly shrinking population of Russia, had seized the Crimea in 2015, then launched the full-scale attack on the nation in 2022.
As the question of more or less U.S. involvement dominated American politics, the issue devolved into a tennis ball batted back and forth. Not everyone understood the toll on Ukrainians, even those living in the United States. Sometimes, comments made on social media and in person took her aback.
“You as West Virginians, if you had family here for 150, 200 years, you know what this is about,” Yorcuba explained. “Your motto is Mountaineers Are Always Free. That’s what Ukraine wants. We’ve always been colonized by Russians.” Another point of comparison, especially for those in Hardy County, lies in the historical memory of the Confederate States, from Union Army Major General Phil Sheridan’s using starvation as a weapon in the nearby Shenandoah Valley to the heroic raid of McNeill’s Rangers.
Yet the understanding did not come as often as hoped. “We felt an otherness,” shared Yorcuba, “a grief about the war socially because of political ruptures, a lot of friendships and a lot of relationships ended.”
“The most irritating thing is when people say Ukrainians are the same as Russians,” she shared, echoing one of the greatest complaints of West Virginians since 1863. The very identity of the place gets erased in so many minds because of the very limited knowledge of the area’s existence as a separate place and culture.
Whitman wrote “The poetic area is very spacious – has so many mansions – has room for all . . . literature in its deepest sense defies measurement, rules, standards; all genius defies the rules.”
“The Pale Goth” released in 2023 and reveals an artist working with not only words, but also how a reader might perceive them on the page. It shares pieces of life from the perspective of multiple women, including the author. Like Sergio Leone’s most famous Westerns, one never hears the name of the protagonist.
A pair of poems, separated by a few others in the work, are entitled My Depression Side A and My Depression Side B. Each takes a song already performed and recorded and puts down how each affects the first person subject of the poem. Yurcaba explained that while some of the first person characters represent her personal experience, others come from the stories of the lives of others.
The Depression poems seem intensely personal. Part of the first, entitled Track 3 – The Cure “Strange Days” offers a series of words, some paired, others individual. They appear in seemingly random spacing on the page and their vague nature to the reader all but confirms how personal these words are to the writer and whoever’s story she is relating here.
Another such poem, “Dead Ringer” spaces words describing a falling, suffering descent towards death, with each word impressing more and more the torment of the subject.
Most of the poems, however, illustrate the life and travails of “the Pale Goth,” the woman with no name. “The Pale Goth” remembers lovers, faces off with a state trooper in a convenience store, and confronts those who once tormented her in high school at the 10-year reunion.
“The great idea – that, O my brethren, that is the mission of poets,” trumpeted Whitman.
Yurcaba’s second book establishes a general theme of a Ukrainian-American navigating these unfamiliar and shifting social landscapes as war rages. Her journey of life and work took her to Europe, to New Jersey, and often to Virginia, but never away from the ongoing war.
“We turned to poetry as a means of expression,” said Yurcaba, who explained further that such works create “unity for the diaspora (spread of a national people outside of their homeland) in community with . . . “the enlisted serving on the front lines.”
Yurcaba’s next work would combine the intensely personal revelations from the lives of women with the intensely personal trauma felt by those who call Ukraine home. It serves the now as an explanation of how Ukrainian Americans deal daily with the fears of war at home and discontent with how others see and also use that conflict.
Whitman explained that, “The words of true poems are the general light and dark.”
Her 2026 publication, Hutsulka, brings a different tone starting with the contrast in title names. The title of the 2026 work refers to a traditional dance performed by large groups in celebration of holidays or happy events, such as weddings. Those participating often wear beautiful bright red and white traditional clothing as a celebration of community and life itself.
“Ode to a Man Who Is the Wolf About Which He Warns” combines the dichotomy of a woman dealing with the typical irritations and occasional indignities of life with that of a patriotic person always in worry over her country. The “man who quotes Kirkegaard” with a taste for the finest in whiskeys also crassly ogles models on social media in front of the poet who he seeks to impress.
After her poetic stream of consciousness moves to “war in my homeland. I haven’t heard from my cousin serving in the army in two days,” it returns to the grandiloquent who alternates soothing reassurances with vulgar discussions of sexual positions. The poem reflects accurately how the continuing suffering halfway around the world intersperses with everyday life.
Others poems lash out at those who think they understand or use apparent empathy to bring attention to themselves. These include “Ode to a U.S. Army Special Forces Soldier Educating Me About My Homeland’s Literature” and also “Ode to a German Rock Star Who Flies My Homeland’s Flag During Rock Concerts.”
Then comes the struggle when even those with whom the poetic subject shares the most intimate ties object to her patriotism. “I wonder how, when you hate my homeland so much you can even tolerate me” reads one line. The subject speculates “perhaps you fantasize about strangling me while I sleep beside you, our cats nestled between us.”
“But the final test of poems, or any character, or work, remains: Has it help’d any human soul?” asked Whitman.
Yurcaba’s works nobly help human souls on two different tracks. They give a deep and personal understanding of a woman who presents to the world in unconventional ways, maintaining her dignity in the face of a world that mostly rejects those expressions. They also reveal the mindset of a people whose agony will continue as long as the drones fly, the artillery fires, and a single soldier in a Russian uniform remains free in their land.
Human souls helped the most, however, are those who live these truths and fears daily. Poems help the human soul in the most fundamental fashion by telling each soul “You are not alone. Someone else has endured as you have.”
