Who better to tell the story of Ukraine than a kobzar, one of the country’s blind wandering minstrels that sang of its history and people? It is this iconic and entertaining figure, who walked the land and conveyed its traditions, that serves as the prism through which Taras Shevchenko composed his pioneering collection of poems, The Kobzar. The origin of the poems themselves is extraordinary. Written over a span of nearly 25 years, they mark many crossroads in Shevchenko’s life. They were composed in villages and cities, in prison and in exile; they are filled with Ukraine’s expansive steppes and verdant groves, peopled with decent individuals yearning for freedom and those who would deny it, and animated by trees, the moon and stars that converse. Shevchenko’s life from serfdom to exile and international artistic acclaim is the cloth from which each poem is cut. History and culture are intertwined with meditations on forgiveness and grace, religion and morality; the poems’ epic scope is complemented with lyrical reflections on subjects that include fame and fortune, love and lust, and the meek and mighty. Of these, family and home become overarching themes, which the poet considers to be of supreme value. As a foundational text, The Kobzar has played an important role in galvanizing the Ukrainian identity and in the development of Ukrainian literature and its written language. The first editions were censored by the czar, but the book still made an enduring impact on Ukrainian culture. There is no reliable count of how many editions of the book have been published, but an official estimate made in 1976 put the figure in Ukraine at 110 during the Soviet period alone. That figure does not include Kobzars released before and after both in Ukraine and abroad. A multitude of translations of Shevchenko’s verse into Slavic, Germanic and Romance languages, as well as Chinese, Japanese, Bengali, and many others attest to his impact on world culture as well. The poet is honored with more than 1250 monuments in Ukraine, and at least 125 worldwide, including such capitals as Washington, Ottawa, Buenos Aires, Warsaw, Moscow and Tashkent. Former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower unveiled the one in Washington.

Kobzar (Ukrainian: Кобзар, “The bard”), is a book of poems by Ukrainian poet and painter Taras Shevchenko. Taras Shevchenko was nicknamed The Kobzar after the publishing of this book. From that time on this title has been applied to Shevchenko's poetry in general and acquired a symbolic meaning of the Ukrainian national and literary revival. A complete collection of Ukrainian poems by Taras Shevchenko is called Kobzar too, after the title of Shevchenko's first book.

Due to more mature content, this book is recommended for children 14 and up. The Kobzars were the blind minstrels of Ukraine, who memorized the epic poems and stories of 100 generations. Traveling around the country, they stopped in towns and villages along the way, where they told their tales and were welcomed by all. During the early years of Stalin's regime in the USSR, the Kobzars wove their traditional stories with contemporary warnings of soviet repression, famine, and terror. When Stalin heard of it, he called the first conference of Kobzars in Ukraine. Hundreds congregated. Then Stalin had them murdered. As the storytellers of Ukraine died, so too did their stories. Kobzar's Children is an anthology of short historical fiction, memoirs, and poems written about the Ukrainian immigrant experience. The stories span a century of history from 1905 to 2004; and they contain the voices of people who lived through internment as "enemy aliens," homesteading, famine, displacement, concentration camps, and this new century's Orange Revolution. More than a collection, it is a social document that revives memories once deliberately forgotten. - Century of untold stories - Touches on all major points of Ukrainian history - Supported by the Shevchenko Foundation The collection contains historical fiction, memoirs and poems covering 100 years of Ukrainian history, written by Ukrainian-Canadian writers from Quebec, Ontario and Western Canada. The contributors are all part of a circle of writers that Skrypuch met or mentored through an internet-based writers' group that she set up. The group's members, both established authors and novices, read and critiqued each others' works. All royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association

What does it mean to be Ukrainian in contemporary Canada? The Ukrainian Canadian writers in Unbound challenge the conventions of genre - memoir, fiction, poetry, biography, essay - and the boundaries that separate ethnic and authorial identities and fictional and non-fictional narratives. These intersections become the sites of new, thought-provoking and poignant creative writing by some of Canada's best-known Ukrainian Canadian authors. To complement the creative writing, editors Lisa Grekul and Lindy Ledohowski offer an overview of the history of Ukrainian settlement in Canada and an extensive bibliography of Ukrainian Canadian literature in English. Unbound is the first such exploration of Ukrainian Canadian literature and a book that should be on the shelves of Canadian literature fans and those interested in the study of ethnic, postcolonial, and diasporic literature.