Dream Bridge: Selected Poems

by Oleh Lysheha, Virlana Tkacz (Translator), Wanda Phipps (Translator)

In this collection, Oleh Lysheha creates worlds in which horses drawn on Paleolithic caves speak their truths and the glance of a swan can transform a lost soul. Each poem leads us down an invisible path that keeps shifting, transforming us and our ideas of poetry, together with the story. In a concluding essay, artistic director Virlana Tkacz relates the story of the translations collected in this volume and the productions she staged with them at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York.

160 pages, Paperback

Published April 26, 2022

About the author

Oleh Lysheha is a Ukrainian poet, playwright, translator and intellectual. Lysheha entered Lviv University in 1968, where during his last year, he was expelled for his participation in an "unofficial" literary circle, Lviv Bohema. As punishment, Lysheha was drafted into the Soviet army and internally exiled. During the period 1972-1988, he was banned from official publication, but in 1989 his first book Great Bridge (Velykyi Mist) was published. For "The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha," Lysheha and his co-translator James Brasfield from Penn State University, received the 2000 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation published by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Lysheha is the first Ukrainian poet to receive the PEN award.