Details of an Hourglass chronicles the anti-world of Soviet prison camps in miniature-poem reflections. Its author, Mykola Horbal, spent 16 years in the notorious Gulag system where he suffered under grueling labor, deprivation, and humiliation.

Mykola Horbal (b. 1940) is a Ukrainian poet, musician, and human rights activist of Lemko heritage. Repressed by the Soviet regime for his dissident writing, Horbal was imprisoned three times in the Gulag for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." Relatively unknown outside of Ukraine, his poems from imprisonment are a unique example of fortitude and creativity in captivity. Published originally in 1983 by Smoloskyp and republished in expanded form in Kyiv in 2008, Horbal's Details of an Hourglass merit their rightful place among the works that laid foundations for the Ukrainian national renaissance and political independence that have paved the way for contemporary Ukrainian literature.