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Stephen Komarnyckyj #FBPE #FBPA

@komarnyckyj

2 Mar

1/27 Thread on Russian links to the Tories, using the example of #Temerko and how they work #FBPA #FBPE . In 2005, Mikhail Khodorkovsky – who until 2003 had been one of the richest men in Russia – sat staring through the bars of a cage in a Russian court like a circus tiger.

2/27 His Yukos oil firm had been seized by the Russian Government and broken up, and he was accused, implausibly, of ordering several murders. Alexander Temerko, the vice president of Yukos, fled to the UK that year to avoid the loss of his liberty and perhaps his life.

3/27 Fourteen years later, Temerko has risen through the ranks of British society. He was a regular confidante of Boris Johnson when, as Foreign Secretary, he was plotting to overthrow the then Prime Minister Theresa May. As a British citizen and a member of the Leaders’ Group of

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Stephen Komarnyckyj #FBPE #FBPA

@komarnyckyj

26 Feb

Skylark #FBPE #FollowBackFriday #PoetInBrexile Why Europe matters

For Isaac Rosenberg

The rat who nuzzled your hand one day,
beneath the Flanders sky the poppy
Tucked behind your ear
White with dust...

A shy lad your narrow ascetic face,
Peers from the cloudscapes,

Above wheat,
The hiss of traffic

Where the motorways snake into Germany
The horse hair whisper
Of the sea...
I sense you here,

The touch of the rat's damp muzzle
Still tingling on your hand,
And over the wire and mud
The sound

Of German voices,
Your face,

Powdering out at the edges of dusk
What will remain of us

Are only the echoes,
The stale liberty we lose
As we forget.
Let me stand with you and listen to the skylark.

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Stephen Komarnyckyj #FBPE #FBPA

@komarnyckyj

26 Feb

#PoetInBrexile #Poetry
Other lives

McCall has a port wine stain and avuncular smile
Arshad's white hair is tinged with nicotine,
Riley combs his hair over the scalp in a dark arc
Their talk is the hubbub of geese on the lake,
I hear from another room. Their campfire

Ghosts of smoke drifting through Autumn,

I weave their life together from scraps gathered
At the edge of the bus station concourse or
The dank shadow of the concrete overpass.
A trilby left on the greyed timbers of a park bench,
With a bottle of vodka sweating condensation

A dark flower of urine blooming on the trousers

Left in a bin bag somewhere. I slip into the clothes
I would only call freedom if freedom is a drizzle
Permeating the landscape of self. I lean back
And feel redemption slide stringent with saltwater
Down a coastal shelf.

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Stephen Komarnyckyj #FBPE #FBPA

@komarnyckyj

26 Feb

1/19 How the Bots won the #Brexit referendum #FBPE #FollowBackFriday Pleaseread and share On 11 April 1992 the headline on the British tabloid newspaper “The Sun” read “It was the Sun wot won it”. The paper, which is owned by media oligarch Rupert Murdoch, was boasting that it

2/19 had swayed the vote in the UK general election two days earlier and brought the Tories to power. The next leader of the defeated Labour party, Tony Blair, courted Murdoch assiduously. He was rewarded with the support of the Sun and stormed to an election victory in 1998.

3/19 Murdoch and his press empire still remain an influential force but they are being displaced. Public opinion is now being moulded by bots on social media platforms such as twitter. In both the US and the UK there was a sense of shock after the results of the 2016 referendum

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Stephen Komarnyckyj #FBPE #FBPA

@komarnyckyj

9 Feb

1/21 Thread on Ukrainian literature and Russian soft power #Ukraine #Poetry I travelled across Ukraine by train in 1993 and spent hours staring mesmerized at the seemingly endless pastures and forests. It was hard to believe that this vast country was so invisible in Western

2/21 culture. Likewise, the Ukraine has one of the richest literatures in Europe, yet it remains untranslated and the country is culturally almost invisible. Why?

3/21 In Valerii Shevchuk’s story, Birds from an Invisible Island, a wanderer is taken prisoner by a mysterious sect. Every night he dreams that a bird flies to him in his chamber, an emissary from beyond the castle walls. Shevchuk’s story conveys the sense that Ukrainians had of

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Stephen Komarnyckyj #FBPE #FBPA

@komarnyckyj

8 Feb

1/47 #Ukraine #Poetry #Translation- a long thread on my PEN award winning translations of Bohdan Ihor Antonych and why this great poet matters to us all

2/47 I first stumbled across Antonych in a musty Soviet edition of his work I purchased in 1993, during my first trip to Ukraine. The book was an impulse buy, partly because I was sickened by what I encountered in my ancestral homeland. Hyperinflation had transformed my auntie

3/47 into a ‘millionaire’ and the interim kupony currency seemed to breed zeroes, like bacteria in a petri dish. A woman, the sickly yellow colour of ill health, fainted at a bus stop. Stalagmites of urine crystallised in the latrines of Kyiv station. I was in a country that was

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More from @komarnyckyj

Stephen Komarnyckyj #FBPE #FBPA

Stephen Komarnyckyj #FBPE #FBPA

Stephen Komarnyckyj #FBPE #FBPA

Stephen Komarnyckyj #FBPE #FBPA

Stephen Komarnyckyj #FBPE #FBPA

Stephen Komarnyckyj #FBPE #FBPA

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