Regina Derieva<\/i>
\nAlien Matter: Selected Poems.
\nSpuyten Duyvil, 104 pages, $10<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
R<\/font>egina Derieva is one of the outstanding writers of the contemporary Russian diaspora. Her books have already appeared in English, Swedish, Italian, and French. Her brilliant translations of Czeslaw Milosz, Thomas Merton, Les Murray, and other celebrated poets contribute to her high poetic reputation. Last but not least, she is a profound essayist.<\/p>\n For all that, she has paid a high price. The words of Eugenio Montale, \u201cIt\u2019s not possible to exaggerate,\u201d taken by Derieva as an epigraph for her poem \u201cAt the Intersection,\u201d would be an appropriate motto for her biography as well. For twenty-six years, she lived in Karaganda, perhaps the most dismal corner of the former Soviet Union\u2014once the center of a vast prison camp universe, later just a gloomy industrial city. Having acquainted herself with Soviet mores better than anyone could wish to, she managed to emigrate. Her experience in Israel and Sweden was, in many respects, no less taxing. It intensified the sense of existential exile that has become her trademark.<\/p>\n This new book of Derieva\u2019s poetry in translation presents only a sampling of her extensive work, which consists of at least twenty collections. Still, it is a gift for every connoisseur of poetry. The main tonality of her writing manages to combine extreme tension and minimalist technique. Derieva\u2019s poems are, as a rule, concise, built on distant associations; she frequently\u2014and successfully\u2014employs a characteristic Russian device, namely the interplay of literary subtexts which serve as passwords for the initiated.<\/p>\n Derieva is, first and foremost, a Christian poet, a worthy heir to the long line of metaphysical poets, be they English, French, or Russian. Without inflated rhetoric or didacticism, her poems reach the very core of the Christian experience\u2014a serious and fearless attitude towards life, suffering, and death. The imagery and syntax of the Gospels and the Prophets is, for her, a natural element\u2014just as apocalyptic presentiments and mystical hope form the axis of her world outlook. She perceives atheism as a foreign language. Still, the religious vocabulary in Derieva\u2019s writing is often juxtaposed with everyday slang and the intonations of prisoners\u2019 songs. This is particularly true of her early poems which might be described as a metaphysics of the totalitarian world, with their constant symbolism of walls, barbed wire, lead poisoning, and torture. They describe a region where \u201cwar is forever going on.\u201d The poetic word (and the divine Word) in this inferno \u201cannoys the powers that be because it lives.\u201d One discerns here an echo of Akhmatova\u2019s \u201cRequiem\u201d and of Brodsky\u2019s poetry. Looking for her kin, a reader may also think of Eliot.<\/p>\n Among Derieva\u2019s poems written \u201cin freedom\u2019s air,\u201d that is, in exile, \u201cWinter Lectures for Terrorists\u201d mercilessly destroys our habitual mythologies (without losing the Biblical and Christian perspective). \u201cThe Last Island,\u201d a polyphonic work which incorporates the author\u2019s Swedish experience, is also particularly striking. As before, poesis docta <\/i>coexists there with an enviable sincerity and spontaneity. But Derieva\u2019s later poetry strives for the inexpressible (\u201cwriting white on white\u201d) even more strongly. The dialectic of despair and hope, of nothingness and everything, finds its embodiment in paradoxical statements which give a poetic dimension to ancient theological dilemmas. For the new place where she lives\u2014to be precise, for her new poetics\u2014Derieva has found an unforgettable formula: \u201cIt is a place where God is not a fact, but where the only fact is man standing before God.\u201d<\/p>\n Regina Derieva is a master of two equally difficult poetic techniques\u2014the traditional rhymed Russian verse (though her rhymes are often inexact, and words are sometimes broken at the end of the line), and vers libre<\/i>. Not all of her seven translators in this volume attempt to reproduce this. Some of them were also at a loss when faced with Derieva\u2019s multifaceted vocabulary. Still, the book successfully brings English speakers nearer to a powerful poet who always strives \u201cupward, on lines of verse,\u201d and who has justly said about herself: \u201cIf someone has forgotten what darkness is I\u2019ll remind them, becoming a heavenly body.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Regina Derieva\u2019s Alien Matter: Selected 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