This first US publication of Knuts Skujenieks one of Latvia's foremost contemporary poets is the author's most important and widely-translated body of work. Convicted in 1962 of anti-Soviet sentiment, Skujenieks wrote these poems during seven years of imprisonment at a labor camp in Mordovia. Vivid and expressive, this collection overcomes the physical experience of confinement in order to assert a limitless creative freedom.A Love PoemI would like clarity. To excludeA relationship's tangled yar...
A Kindred Orphanhood (In the Grip of Strange Thoughts)
by Sergey Gandlevsky
Translated by Philip Metres An integral member of the ’70s generation, Gandlevsky was one of the underground Russian poets who began by writing only for themselves and their circles of friends during the Brezhnev era. Despite their relative cultural obscurity—or perhaps, precisely because of their situation as internal émigrés—Gandlevsky and the Seventies Generation forged new directions in Russian poetry, unfettered by the pressures that burdened Russian writers both prior to, and during, the...
The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin (Cliff Becker Prize)
by Maxim Amelin
The Joyous Science offers a comprehensive introduction to Maxim Amelin. The poems span Amelin’s long career and cover his many thematic concerns. A loving collector of neologisms and a devoted student of Revolutionary word-smithing (à la Mayakovsky), Amelin keeps his poetry in suspension through a tension of opposites. He writes of bodily pleasures while musing on the body’s resurrection. He is critical of Russia but loves its language. Riddles, odes, and elegies appear alongside a long poem, “T...
Presented in a dual-language format, A Field of Foundlings is the first in Lost Horse Press’s series of Ukrainian poetry in translation. Starovoyt’s poetry investigates the curse and virtue of forgetting, the suppressed generational memory of the twentieth century, and the new context of its retelling in Eastern Europe. Drawing on the paradoxes of mythology, technology, and tradition, Starovoyt brings the traces of undesirable history and the minefields of memory into an unexpected constellation...
From the artistic passion of the St Petersburg poets and bohemians, to the collective suffering of a nation through this turbulent century, Akhmatova spoke to, and for, the soul of her people. Born in 1889, Anna survived upheavals, refusing to abandon either Russia or her craft despite vicious attacks on her name and censorship of her work. When committing poems to paper threatened to cause her arrest, a few close friends faithfully memorized her lines. By the time she died in 1966, Anna was rec...
The most beautiful and powerful of Milosz's poems from across his writing lifeThis selection brings together the most beautiful and powerful of Czeslaw Milosz's poems, spanning his writing life. In verses such as 'Café' he considers the upheaval, revolutions and two world wars that he had witnessed, while 'My Faithful Mother Tongue' reflects the loyalty he felt to his native Polish language. He also remembers his schooldays in 'The World', and in 'Bypassing Rue Descartes' recalls the Paris stree...
Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age (Anthem Nineteenth-Century)
by Anatoly Liberman
Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age is the first translation of nearly all the lyrics by Evgeny Boratynsky (1800–1844), one of the greatest poets of the Golden Age of Russian poetry. The translation retains the meter and rhyming of the original. The commentary following each work provides the necessary background information and often includes translations from the works of Boratynsky’s contemporaries and of later poets. Boratynsky is thus presented against the background of contemporar...
One of the pillars of nineteenth-century Russian prose fiction alongside towering figures such as Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev started his writing career as a poet, gaining much critical acclaim and renown in that field. The title piece of this collection, Parasha, which brought the young author to the attention of the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky and established his reputation, is a humorous narrative poem in the vein of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin or Lermonto...
This pioneering book is the first to present the postwar phenomenon of the New York Group of Ukrainian emigre poets as a case study for exploring cultural and aesthetic ramifications of exile. It focuses on the poets diasporic and transnational connections both with their country of origin and their adopted homelands, underscoring the group's role in the shaping of the cultural and literary image of Ukraine abroad. Displacements, forced or voluntary, engender states of alterity, states of living...
Russkaja Pojezija Nachala Hh Veka (Dooktjabr'skij Period)
by Various