Reviews
“This is an extraordinary enterprise, a double transposition, from Russian to English, prose to verse. [A.L.]‘s method is to weld words and phrases from a selected passage from Platonov’s great novel, Chevengur, into a short poem, together with paraphrases and additional words of her own, its metrical and stanzaic forms dictated by the material. At the end of the book, the underlying passages from Platonov’s prose are given in both the original and in translation, with words used in the poems in bold type, providing for the fascinating business of comparison. There is also a broad outline of the narrative of Chevengur (the name of an imaginary town deep in the steppe, where soon after 1917 a group of impatient Bolsheviks are keen to establish communism without delay) <. . .> Over all, with its ‘grey’ tone and humble stylistic level, its loose but tangible narrative setting and its running symbols – wind, rain, water, worms, burdock, people on the move, sleep – this poem-cycle makes a moving incursion into Platonov’s world of bewilderment, expectancy, abandonment and loss.”
Antony Wood, Modern Poetry in Translation, 2005, series 3, no. 3