“When Chris Agee invited me to edit this special issue of Irish Pages, I seized the opportunity. Ireland is the natural ally of all countries engaged in anti-colonial battles. The very title Chris proposed, ‘War in Europe,’ immediately set the right tone. Without waiting on Brussels, Chris granted Ukraine the wish that has cost it so dearly in blood and treasure: membership in the European Union. It was for this Ukrainians rebelled against their former president, Viktor Yanukovych, and it’s for this they are being punished by Russia today. Hundreds of thousands have died; cities have been leveled. And I’ve just learned that Ukraine’s most celebrated poet, Serhiy Zhadan, plans, at the age of 50, to enlist in the National Guard.

The poetry of Yeats had long provided me with a model of verse which manages to argue both with itself and the world without lapsing into jingoism or rhetoric. I was also fortunate enough to count Seamus Heaney a friend in the years of Ireland’s “Troubles” and to witness how skillfully he managed to weave responses to public dramas with more intimate and personal reflections, to speak to issues relating to the polis without sounding ‘political’. For some of us, the personal is political, whether we like it or not …”

Askold Melnyczuk, Guest Editor