Meditations on Fathers and Sons, by Ihor Pidhainy

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The story of fathers and sons is an ancient trope. In this collection of lyrical verse, Pidhainy takes up this theme and explores it within the context of his own family and layered generations that stretch from Ukraine to Canada to the United States. Through these poems, the history and difficulties that families face are brought into profile. Rooted in an almost nostalgic past, the author nevertheless turns (his) attention to the present generation and examines the joys and difficulties of contemporary life, where they try to set their own agenda.

In Ihor Pidhainy’s Meditations on Fathers and Sons, it is the mundane that mostly stands out. Fishing trips, family dinners, picking up wood from the roadside. There are sentimental portraits such as “Scholar-Cossack,” “Photo of my Son at Work,” and “Fishing in the Deep,” but also in the more caustic visions of this younger generation in “Words about my Father” and “I Saw Daddy Stumble in the Field.” In the former, the refrain “It is not early/ It is not late/ My father is dying,” and variants of the last line hauntingly recollect that our time is limited, and our songs can only capture the moment.

Nevertheless this is a volume that confronts the ever changing perspectives in the world. Man’s brutality is on display in “Somewhere in Moscow Someone Feels Uneasy,” a foray into the indiscriminatory destruction waged by Putin and Russia in Kharkiv, the father’s hometown. But despite this, the author finds through the poems a grace that accepts illness and death and suggests continuity through the coming generations. This humanist resurrection is at the heart of the poems present here. They bring to life through memory, song and image what the older generations had to offer, and they meditate upon what future generations might be bound to carry on.

Ihor Pidhainy is a lecturer and a writer who lives in the Atlanta region. Born in Canada, of Ukrainian heritage, he has been writing poetry since his teenage years, and only recently has sought out publishing in this field. His poetry has appeared in Washington Square Review, Litbop, The Alchemy Spoon, Juste Milieu Zine, Ranger Magazine and elsewhere. He has also published fiction in various journals.