Authors

Discussion

Сьогодні знову копаємо землю 

Цю ненависну донецьку землю 

Цю черству закам’янілу землю 

Тулимося до неї 

Ховаємося в ній 

Ще живі. 

Ми ховаємося за землю 

Сидимо в ній тихо 

Наче малі діти за маминою спиною 

Ми чуємо як б’ється її серце 

Як вона втомлено дихає 

Нам тепло й затишно 

Ще живі.

Borys Humeniuk [1]

This paper explores how contemporary Ukrainian poetry, at the intersection of war and ecology, functions as an urgent form of eco-testimony. Taking Borys Humeniuk’s image of the earth, at once wounded and maternal, as a guiding motif, I analyse a curated corpus of war poetry written between 2014 and 2024. 

The study employs close reading within the limits of an ecocritical framework, drawing on trauma studies and environmental humanities, to trace how poets mobilize the condensed form and affective charge of verse “to presence” the entanglement of human and non-human suffering. This approach foregrounds the land as an active site of trauma, shelter, and witness. Until now, the ecological dimensions of war poetry have been predominantly studied in global scholarship through the lens of Edward Thomas’s “land writings”[2]; this paper extends the field by situating Ukrainian ecopoetics within the framework of war ecologies. In fact, Darya Tsymbalyuk’s The Ecocide in Ukraine (2025) stands as the only major work to explicitly point to the ecological dimension of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

The analysis concludes that contemporary Ukrainian poetry (by Iryna Tsilyk, Kateryna Mikhalitsyna, and others) articulates a double testimony: they expose the devastation and long-term degradation of ecosystems while simultaneously inscribing the resilience of the land as an agent of memory and survival.

[1] Desiat’ virshiv pro viynu. Chytomo. URL: https://chytomo.com/10-virshiv-pro-10-rokiv-vijny/

[2] Riding, J. (2017). Land writings: excursions in the footprints of Edward Thomas. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.