The Thousand-Year Minutes (2014)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 [Issue #49] (October 2014)

Books and Magazines in brief:

Eugene Dubnov. The Thousand-Year Minutes. ISBN 978-1-907356-74-2. Translated by Anne Stevenson & the author. UK: Shoestring Press, 2013.

Eugene Dubnov: The Thousand-Year Minutes (2013)

Anne Stevenson shouldn’t need much introduction to most fans of contemporary poetry: biographer of Sylvia Plath (Bitter Fame, 1989), and award-winning poet in her own right, she’s now collaborated with Eugene Dubnov on this sumptuous dual-text selection of work from his two volumes of poetry in Russian, Russet Coins (1978) and By Sky and Earth (1984). One of Dubnov’s poems is included on p.79 of this issue of Poetry NZ, so you can see something of how he writes: a somewhat old-fashioned voice, some would say, but as the poetry of the earth and of pastoral makes a belated comeback, I think such verses make more and more sense to us. As Stevenson puts it in her introduction to the book: “The English cribs he sent me … brought to mind the dream-like paintings of Chagall” [p.xii]. I would add, something of the pure and uninflected voice of John Clare: “targets in the river / grief in the grass / rain / the spangled asphalt” [“Cityscape,” p.9].

(26-27/9/14)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 1 [Issue #49]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 228.

[185 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 (2014)


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