What We Saw from This Mountain
What We Saw from This Mountain
$18.00
About the Book
This is the first English-language collection of poetry by contemporary Russian poet, essayist, and prose writer Vladimir Aristov, a satellite figure of the Metarealist literary movement of the 1980s–90s. While the late Alexei Parshchikov and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko are somewhat better known to US readers, Aristov, who was their close friend, exemplifies both poets’ trajectories—his work explores metaphor-centered narrative poetry while assimilating American Language poetry and European postmodern theory. Aristov’s poetics is characterized by a philosophical thoughtfulness made more profound by his life-long work as a scientist, and by striking images that evoke the late poetry of Osip Mandelstam.
Author
Vladimir Aristov
Vladimir Aristov (b. 1950, Moscow) is a poet and physicist. Since his first publications in the late 1980s, Aristov has authored seven books of poetry, a novel, numerous articles and essays, and a play about the Russian philosopher Gustav Shpet (killed by Stalin in the 1930s). Associated with the Metarealist movement, Aristov’s poetry and essays have been published widely in Russian literary magazines (Nezavisimaia gazeta, Arion, Vozdukh, NLO, etc.) He is a recipient of the Alexei Kruchenykh Prize (1993) and the Andrei Bely Independent Literary Prize (2008), and his work was included in two US anthologies of post-modern Russian poetry, The Third Wave and Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry. He has translated George Seferis and Michael Palmer into Russian and is currently working on a collection of essays entitled Idem-Forma.
Praise
Excerpt
O grant me pity for the dragon
While he sleeps
And the radio announcer’s voice whispers indifferently
His daytime speech.
Before the dragon wakes
Before the bloody depths have opened in his eyes
Before St. George appears
To plunge his spear
Into that powerless eye.
Before the dragon has become so human in his pain.
O grant me time enough while St. George lives.
And the announcer is unable in his fright
To forestall the flight of the bat piercing him
And lets it go into the air as a word.