For the Birds

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For the Birds is the moving, assured debut collection of poems from Ukrainian-born Victoria Melkovska, an Irish resident for the past 20 years. From reflections on her early life in the former Soviet Union (We Were from the USSR) to the new arrival's first impressions of life in in Ireland (New Land, New Home), For the Birds explores and explains these two worlds to each other, and indeed to the poet herself, in poems that contribute in a uniquely personal way to one of the most significant conversations of our time. Throughout, however, is the threat of something lurking in the wings. And in the book's third section, (Warzone), that darkness disturbingly takes centrestage. Protected from the immediate dangers yet powerless in the face of them, Melkovska responds to the invasion of her homeland, and the atrocities that have followed, with poems of determined focus and unsettling detail, her poetry rising to a kind of defence of what she, and what all of us, hold dear.