Welcome to Donetsk
You teach me this wartime trick –
to look for living pot plants
in the windows on Kievska Avenue.
Most are crisped and brown.
But one green geranium
and a succulent spider plant
offer proof of life
for the person who waters them.
Whole apartment blocks are abandoned.
Collapsed telephone lines,
blown-up branches
litter the road.
No voices,
no tinkering metalwork in the distance,
no buses, no playing children.
Leaves rustle white noise.
You say, It’s like Sunday every day.
Stray dogs and swallows,
and the soft thud of shelling.
Welcome to Donetsk is from One Language, a collection of poems with additional short prose and photographs by the English-Swedish photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind (who won the Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet competition in 2021). Welcome to Donetsk responds to the earlier conflict in Ukraine, ignited in 2014 by the seizure of the Donbas region by Russian-backed separatists. Now Taylor-Lind is once more in the country to cover the war.
The title Welcome to Donetsk quotes the postcard that is the closing image of the section, Stories, in which Welcome to Donetsk appears. Recalling a time when the city would have had tourists and visitors, the postcard view reveals the river-threaded spaciousness of Donetsk, the fifth largest city in Ukraine, with a foreground of rocks and greenery that, off camera, will blend ultimately into the grasslands of the steppe.
Addressing perhaps a friend or colleague who has been showing the newly arrived photojournalist around, Welcome to Donetsk focuses on the plants in apartment block windows. To read the plants is a “wartime trick” for finding out if the inhabitants are still alive and present. The plants are mostly “crisped and brown”. If, rarely, they’re green, they “offer proof of life / for the person who waters them”. The syntax here complicates the statement that the watered plants prove the person who cares for them is alive, suggesting the plants are themselves offering a reassuring “proof of life” to their beleaguered owners.
As the scene develops, the possible explanation as to why Taylor-Lind decided to introduce poems into her photographic record emerges. The focus expands beyond the images of resiliently green geranium and spider plants to consider the sounds of the street. Sound dominates the last two stanzas, layering the rustled “white noise” of the leaves with noises no longer actually audible, but able to be evoked by skilfully used language. In the lines noting the absence of sounds – “no voices, / no tinkering metalwork in the distance” – “tinkering” is a neat coinage, capturing the tinkling of lightly hammered metalwork as well as the useful pleasure of “tinkering” with machines and gadgets – a noise which would mean “business as usual” in the factory or domestic back yard. A Sunday-like absence of human activity becomes more desolate with the image of the city street given over to “Stray dogs and swallows” and the accompanying “soft thud of shelling” in the distance. This is the line that almost inconspicuously, with hushed consonants, inserts the truth of the situation.
The writer responds to personal loss and sexual politics in the divided landscapes her collection encompasses – Libya and the South Caucasus as well as Ukraine. An autobiographical section, Stories No-One Wants to Hear, returns to formative experiences of aggression in an English childhood. In a prose piece, the author recalls her father encouraging her to hit the school bullies, saying: “Anastasia, some people only understand one language.” The anecdote, which provides the collection with its title, continues: “My dad was the first person I punched, to stop him from hitting my mum.” The frankness, rejection of complacency and alertness to moral ambiguity power all the work in the collection and ensure it resonates as a personal as well as political act of witness.
Taylor-Lind’s first book was Maidan – Portraits from the Black Square, a photographic record of her earlier visit to Ukraine depicting anti-government protestors and mourners. It was published by Gost in 2014.
