Sometimes a line of poetry shocks you out of your complacency. A Ukrainian friend, with family living still in the war zone, recently gave me a book by the poet Oksana Maksymchuk.

Still City: Diary of an Invasion was begun while war still threatened. Maksymchuk then charts the course of the war, and its impact on people who once believed they would be spared the horrors that marked the lives of previous generations.

Ukraine was and is contested territory – a strategically important prize in eastern Europe. Such is Ukrainians’ awareness of their vulnerability, that anticipation of war is part of their DNA.

Maksymchuk gives voice to that in her poem A Museum of Rescued Objects. “In the months preceding the unspeakable I hoarded / food and supplies from across the country / following the script I’d inherited from my grandmother / and her grandmother before her / so immediately felt – it seemed instinctual.”

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She goes on to list the objects and the places they come from, places that have become all-too familiar throughout the course of the war: Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kherson, Irpin.

Those........

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