Contemporary Russian Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology

Smith's ( Songs to Seven Strings ) collection of contemporary Russian poetry should be useful to anyone with a serious interest in work produced during recent years both by poets living in the U.S.S.R. and by prominent Third Wave emigres. He has selected the work of 23 poets loosely linked through their use of technical formalism (which is the norm among Russian poets) and through the moral questioning that has long dominated Russian poetry. The volume begins appropriately with the cautionary words of Boris Slutsky (1919-1986): ``Any beginning is the beginning of the end. / That's why we begin with an egg, / but end up with a smashed shell. . . .'' The youngest poet in the anthology, Aleksei Parshchikov (b. 1954), lives today in Palo Alto, Calif., and his work pitches an interesting echo: ``After all, our names are not multipliable, but divisible / by the ploughed-up earth. . . .'' The collection also includes a small selection by poets who are better known to an American audience, such as Bella Akhmadulina and the Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. The introductory and biographical materials are excellent. (May)