Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets
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.
"...the abundant, unexpected, Rattle-baggy hullabulloo of contemporary Russian women poets... It has been on my bedside table since it arrived, and I marvel at the work [that has gone] into it – it's so full of information and interest, uniquely representative, full of the jostle and bustle of the living scene" – Seamus Heaney
About the Author
Daniel Weissbort was born in 1935. He read History at Cambridge and did postgraduate work in the politics of literature during the post-Stalin period. He has translated many modern Russian poets, including Nikolai Zabolotsky and Yunna Morits. He edited Ted Hughes: "Selected Translations" (2006). He is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa. He founded "Modern Poetry in Translation" with Ted Hughes in 1965, and was on the advisory board of the London Poetry International festivals from 1969 to 1972. He lives in London.
