Critical Commentary
There is a stark beauty to this collection of poems inspired by time working in Ukraine. You can feel the words echo through the empty spaces left by bombing and the poems ask the reader to see the holiness in the grief, the dust, the beets, the soup, the cries, the hands reaching out. Ned Breslin’s poems are acts of authenticity and truth-telling. They act as an invitation to enter intimacy with struggle to the world beyond the perimeter of war. Each poem is a prayer, an offering of hope.
~ Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE, poet, author, online Abbess at www.AbbeyoftheArts.com.
Born from direct service, this collection transforms witness into art, capturing the profound humanity that emerges amid the devastation of war. Ned Breslin doesn't merely observe Ukraine's resilience—he participates in it, serving food and warmth to civilians from Kherson to Kharkiv while bearing witness to their courage. It is all too much. These poems are like hugs because hugs are needed. They honor the Vitas and Sergiys, who, hearing explosions (Hope survives faintly where gaps in the ruin exist), choose to stay, who hold neighbors in their hearts and arms even as tanks gather under tarpaulin. Written with the intimacy of shared meals and the gravity of shared danger, this work reveals how poetry can become an act of faith and solidarity, documenting not just survival but the fierce tenderness that sustains communities under siege. A testament to both the power of presence and the necessity of bearing poetic witness.
~ Iryna Starovoyt, author of A Field of Foundlings
Ned Breslin's Praisesong explores lives lived amid the ruins in war-torn Ukraine, offering vignettes of identities fractured and yet fractal in their wholeness, characters resistant to dissolution and subverting circumstances. But there is also a "natural mystic" (à la Bob Marley) that pervades the work, indications of a heaven resident in the earth and earthy reality, shards of Gnostic Christianity gleaming amid the rubble, as Jesus (Yeshua) walks among the Ukrainians, in all his divine humanity, offering holy tears to the living and the dead.
~ Netanel Miles-Yépez, Professor of Religion at Naropa University and author of The End of Religion and Other Writings.
Ned Breslin is an American who helped Ukrainians by supplying provisions to vulnerable communities after the expansion of Russia's genocide war on Ukraine. Praisesong is a collection of poetry drawing on his experiences and presenting the horrors of Russian invasion with detachment and faith. Breslin is an accomplished and disciplined poet with a gift for the telling phrase and an eye for the small detail that conveys a whole world of perceptions, textures and emotions. Breslin’s seeing Ukraine as it is matters enormously now. Breslin’s book will help collapse the empire of the mind Russia has built in the west and hopefully we will see a better world emerge.
“A knowing smile/whispers please/when smiles are hard to rebuild/after the violence...”
~ Stephen Komarnyckyj, PEN award winning literary translator and poet.
“in a city where nothing moves/A city with no mouths/to feed” we enter Ned Breslin’s remarkable collection about feeding people on the Ukrainian frontline. These poems are carefully rendered with love and compassion for as people suffer in the deepest ways, they are also profoundly nourished. In this place of “unimaginable sorrow” we discover “Heavenly encounters/where God shines/in contradiction/in paradox.”
~ Elizabeth Jacobson author of There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral.
In Praisesong: Delivering Food on the Ukrainian Front Line, Ned Breslin writes fourteen exquisite poems about the hope, care and resilience of people he has met living in war-torn Ukraine. We also learn about the courageous food fighters from World Central Kitchen. As a World Central Kitchen’s Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Director, Ned Breslin has been on the front-line providing food and water to people in communities ripped apart by the destruction of war. His poetry captures the small but meaningful details of men and women trying to survive with dignity and an ethic of care despite being surrounded by betrayal, dead bodies, destroyed apartments and schools, and a lack of basic necessities. I was particularly moved by “Thanksgiving in Kyiv,” which captures the traumatic experience of a red-capped woman wearing a “gray winter jacket, clearly not her own.” When given a gift of a cup of coffee, she “ever so slightly returns to herself.” As the poem continues, we see her family, her bombed apartment, family photographs on the floor, and her young child, whom she picks up and holds. Every poem in this book helps us feel the devasting experience of Ukraine’s war, but also the ways in which neighbors help each other with whatever resources they have. Praisesong is a powerful book of poetry.
~ Beth Franklin: Executive Director of the Colorado Poets Center and emerita professor in English as a Second Language at the University of Northern Colorado
