A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION

This anthology, the first of its kind, aims to be comprehensive. Valentina Polukhina surveys 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 by Russian women poets living abroad (in Britain, the United States, Italy, France, Israel, etc) is also 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 and 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 distinguished 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 who were less compromised by the Soviet system, offering more resistance to the pressures of political conformism.

Table of Contents

 Includes poems by:



Bella Akhmadulina

Polina Barskova

Tatyana Bek

Natalya Belchenko

Larisa Berezovchuk

Marina Boroditskaya

Ekaterina Boyarskikh

Zinaida Bykova

Svetlana Dengina

Regina Derieva

Marina Dolia

Irina Ermakova

Galina Ermoshina

Zoya Ezrokhi

Elena Fanailova

Nina Gabrielian

Mariya Galina

Dina Gatina

Anna Glazova

Linor Goralik

Natalya Gorbanevskaya

Anna Gorenko

Nina Gorlanova

Faina Grimberg

Elena Ignatova

Nina Iskrenko

Olga Ivanova

Svetlana Ivanova

Inna Kabysh

Katia Kapovich

Svetlana Kekova

Marina Khagen

Olga Khvostova

Mariya Kildibekova

Nina Kossman

Elena Kostyleva

Elena Kostyleva

Irina Kovaleva

Ella Drylova

Marina Kudimova

Inna Kulishova

Yuliya Kunina

Inga Kuznetsova



and many more.