This Lamentable City: Poems of Polina Barskova

by Polina Barskova, Ilya Kaminsky (Translator)

Overview

Polina Barskova’s poems are a zesty paradoxical concoction: bawdy and erudite, elegant and raw, subtle and brazen. As Ilya Kaminsky attests in his introduction to This Lamentable City, “Barskova is an elegiac poet who brings to her American readers a language formally inventive, worldly and humorous. One of her strengths is her ability to bring together strikingly erotic, sensual images… with a deep sense of history and culture.… In Russian, Barskova is a master of meter, rhyme, and alliteration, and… (w)hat comes across in English is the tonality of the poems, the clarity of her vocal play and images, her intricacy of address.” Though her prize-winning books of poetry in Russian have earned an international reputation, and individual poems have appeared in prestigious journals and anthologies — for instance, in Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2008) and An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets (Iowa, 2005) — this is the first book of Barskova’s poems to be published in translation, in a handsome dual-language edition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781932195835
Publisher:	Tupelo Press
Publication date:	03/22/2010
Series:	2010 Subscription Series
Pages:	50
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

In her homeland of Russia, Polina Barskova is considered a prodigy, one of the most accomplished and daring of the younger poets. Born in 1976 in Leningrad--now called St. Petersburg, as before--she began publishing poems in journals at age nine and released the first of her six books as a teenager. She came to the United States at the age of twenty to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, having already earned a graduate degree in classical literature at the state university in St. Petersburg. Barskova now lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Hampshire College.

Editorial Reviews

Barskova is a poet whose voice is at once so intimate and taunting, it can be almost impossible to resist her. “Are you still frightened,” begins the book's first poem, “my clueless devochka?” It is this closeness, as though her lines are whispered in your ear, that allows Barskova to turn away from us with such terrific effect in her poems. “Now you will forget what you desired,” she writes, “Now,/ Who you were.” Though only 10 poems appear in this collection, Barskova demonstrates an extraordinary amount of vocal variation, as in “When someone dies...,” in which Barskova is clear and unforgiving in her instructions on how to handle a dead man: “Right now you should lick him.” In deceptively simple English, Kaminsky's translation (with Matthew Zapruder) allows Barskova's brusque, plainspoken Russian to shine through. The few muddled moments in the translation arise out of an attempt to be both simple and abstract with the English (the single line, “Left to the right directly straight-ahead,” for instance). Nevertheless, Barskova's is a voice of stunning originality and eroticism. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

[Barskova's] words flicker—strange, elegant—a Russian evanescence. Heat lightning pulses between her lines.
—The New York Times

Dana Jennings