An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets

Description

This anthology aims to be comprehensive. Valentina Polukhina has surveyed the entire scene, reading some 1000 collections and manuscripts, and thoroughly investigating what is accessible on the vibrant Russian literary Internet. The anthology ranges from Moscow to Vladivostok. It includes writers from former Soviet Republics such as the Ukraine. Work also by Russian women poets living abroad (in Britain, the United States, Italy, France, Israel etc.), is represented. Focusing on the middle generation, with major figures like Svetlana Kekova, Vera Pavolova and Tatyana Shcherbina, the anthology includes work by the youngest generation, born after 1970 and virtually unknown outside Russia, as well as senior poets like Bella Akhmadulina and Natalya Gorbanevskaya. Consultants have included scholars, critics, editors, like Dmitry Kuzmin, who created the indispensable poetry website for younger poets, Vavilon. Other consultants in Russia include Olga Sedakova (Moscow State University/MGU), Irina Kovaleva (MGU), and Lyudmila Zbuova (St. Petersburg University). Translators include such English poets as Elaine Feinstein, Ruth Fainlight, Maura Dooley and Carol Rumens, as well as Russianists and scholars in Britain and the United States such as Peter France (Edinburgh), Catriona Kelly (Oxford), Robert Reid (Keele) and Stephanie Sandler (Harvard). "Russian poetry is in a healthy state as it leaves the glaciers of Communism for the steamy jungle of western hedonism," D.M. Thomas declared in "Poetry London". The anthology provides a host of insights into post-Soviet reality, from the point of view of women writers were less compromised by the Soviet system, offering more resistance to the pressures of political conformism. Recipient of a Poetry Society Special Commendation and a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

Valentina Polukhina is Emeritus Professor, Keele University. She specialises in modern Russian poetry and is the author of several major studies of Joseph Brodsky. She has published a number of articles on other Russian poets and edited bilingual collections of the poetry of Olga Sedakova (1994), Dmitry Prigov (1995) and Evgeny Rein (2001). Daniel Weissbort edited the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation, which he co-founded with the late Ted Hughes, from 1965-2003. He is Emeritus Professor, University of Iowa, where he directed the MFA Program in Translation. Currently, he is Honorary Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Weissbort has published numerous collections of translations and has edited several anthologies and collections of his own poetry, most recently Letters to Ted (Anvil, 2003).