In the December issue of the popular Ukrainian newspaper “Gordon Boulevard”, ending the 2013, the fifteenth band was given to Alexander Korotko. In the rubric “More than a poet” – a new publication ” Memory writes long letters to home, but always is guarded by a rabid convoy”, named after the line of the poem from the poetic triptych “Valaam”, written at the end of this year. A cycle of three poems was started in Israel and finished in Kiev. Pain, compassion and, at the same time, gratitude and respect for people with an incredible tragic fate, contempt and hatred for those who turned their earthly life into hell is “Valaam.” The cycle was written according to the living story of the writer and doctor Alexander Gohfeld about the mass resettlement of invalids of the Great Patriotic War into special closed boarding schools, in fact, the camps located in hard-to-reach places of the empire, including the Vaalam.   Civil theme can not be apsent in the poet’s work, otherwise it is not a poet. Russian and world literature with many examples of this confirmation. Alexander Korotko, at different periods of his creative life, appeared “protest” poems, but not “frontal”, hurray-patriotic, but with deep philosophical comprehension of global historical events, and distant in time (revolution, war), and taking place here and now ( Confrontation in Ukraine). The civil position of the indifferent person, the person, with the ability to analyze, understand and deeply experience, in the form of a poetic triptych with the name “Maidan” completes a new collection, which could have another title – “Between hell and paradise”.