A Blaze In A Desert: Selected Poems

Description

Victor Serge (1890-1947) played many parts, as he recounted in his indelible Memoirs of a Revolutionary. The son of anti-czarist exiles in Brussels, Serge was a young anarchist in Paris; a syndicalist rebel in Barcelona; a Bolshevik in Petrograd; a Comintern agent in Central Europe; a comrade of Trotsky's; a friend of writers like Andrei Bely, Boris Pilnyak, and Andre Breton; a prisoner of Stalin; a dissident Marxist in exile in Mexico... Like Serge's extraordinary novels, A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems bears witness to decades of revolutionary upheavals in Europe and the advent of totalitarian rule; many of the poems were written during the "immense shipwreck" of Stalin's ascendancy. In poems datelined Petrograd, Orenburg, Paris, Marseille, the Caribbean, and Mexico, Serge composed elegies for the fallen-as well as prospective elegies for the living who, like him, endured prison, exile, and bitter disappointment in the revolutions of the first half of the twentieth century: Night falls, the boat pulls in, stop singing. Exile relights its captive lamps on the shore of time. Throughout A Blaze in a Desert, Serge draws on the heritage of late- and post-Symbolist writers like Verhaeren, Rictus, Apollinaire, Blok, and Bely-themselves authors of messages of a more general resistance by the human spirit-to express the anguish of the failure of the Russian Revolution and to search out glimmers of hope in the ruins of the Second World War. A Blaze in a Desert comprises Victor Serge's sole published book of poetry, Resistance (1938), his unpublished manuscript Messages (1946), and his last poem, "Hands" (1947).

Victor Serge (1890-1947) was an anarchist firebrand, who wrote three novels, was arrested, and lived in precarious exile throughout his life. James Brook (translator and editor) is a poet whose translations include works by Guy Debord, Henri Michaux, Gellu Naum, and Benjamin Peret. He is the principal editor of Resisting the Virtual Life (with Iain Boal) and Reclaiming San Francisco (with Chris Carlsson and Nancy J. Peters). The New York Times named his translation of Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Prone Gunman a Notable Book. Richard Greeman (afterword) is the translator of five novels by Victor Serge, including Men in Prison and Birth of Our Power from PM Press. He has published literary, political, and biographical studies of Serge in many languages.

"An international rebel with a cause, ever the champion of the downpressed and foreclosed, and of 'all the broken young wings, ' Victor Serge--deported, exiled, hounded from country to country and continent to continent--inhabited a 'planet without visas.' But in A Blaze in a Desert Serge's poetry, which witnessed the rise of modern totalitarian political ideologies and ideologues, comes home to Walt Whitman's band of brothers. And James Brook's erudite introduction guides us well through Serge's engagement with poetry and poets and the enduring struggle for justice." --Gloria Frym, author, Mind over Matter and The True Patriot