Alien Matter

Poetry. Translated from the Russian by Alan Shaw, Robert Reid, Richard McKane, Andrey Gritsman, Peter France, Kevin Carey, and Ilya Bernstein. Edited by Hildred Crill. "The poetry of Regina Derieva is an outstanding and unusual phenomenon. It corresponds to the poetical experience of Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, and Brodsky, and at the same time keeps pace not only with contemporary Russian but also perhaps world literature. Regina Derieva is a modern poet whoemploys not only traditional but also free verse. Yet she writes out of time, or rather, in the time of the Old Testament and Revelation. Whilereading Regina Derieva's poems, it occurred to me that tradition is something greater than only poetic tradition. Her poetic creations call to mind theWord--Psalms and Prophets, and especially the parables of the Gospels. Following elevated models, Regina Derieva sets in motion secret resources of speech, discovering its paradoxical nature. Lively beat of dictionary, unexpected substitution of notions and interchange of bitterly re-interpreted quotations give her poetry profundity, and quite often, epigrammatical precision. Her images are rather capricious and elusive, at first sight even accidental; but this is deceptive accidention, which is only the other side of necessity"--Tomas Venclova, professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Yale University and contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Republic.