If you can’t get your head around what’s happening in Ukraine perhaps a poet can help…

A dear friend, poet and novelist Naomi Foyle will be reading tonight at English PEN’s Ukrainian Poetry Evening in Oxford alongside poet Ihor Pavlyuk and translator Steve Komarnyckyj

Naomi isn’t Ukrainian but her poetry has been translated and published there and she grew up “painting pysanky and eating pierogi on the Canadian prairies”. If you can’t get to St Andrew’s College tonight at 7pm I really recommend you visit Naomi’s blog and discover her thoughts on what is happening right now.  She says again and again that she is no expert and isn’t afraid to admit that she has changed her mind over the course of the last few months, but she has diligently tried to piece together what’s happening and her article on the subject is peppered with useful and insightful links. Here’s a quote from it…

 Like most people watching the new Ukrainian interim government shift to a war footing, I hope there is still time for world diplomacy to help. But like everyone tonight, I don’t know what new aggression tomorrow will bring.  I do know, however, that I will learn far more about the crisis and its background from Steve and Ihor in person, and I promise to blog again on Ukraine after my return from Oxford.

In uncertain times , we need poets.

A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep – Salman Rushdie