Apollo in the grass: selected poems

✍ Scribed by Aleksandr Kushner

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 144 KB
• Edition: First edition
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0374535485

✦ Synopsis

The more softly the word is pronounced
The more ardent, the more miraculous.
The less it dreams of becoming a song
That much nearer it draws to music.
__-from "Apollo in the Grass"

For the Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, the poems of Aleksandr Kushner were essential: "Kushner is one of the best Russian lyric poets of the twentieth century, and his name is destined to rank with those close to the heart of everyone whose mother tongue is Russian."

Apollo in the Grass is the first collection in English translation of Kushner's post-Soviet poems, and also includes certain earlier ones that could not be published during the Soviet era.

Kushner speaks to us from a place where the mythic and the historic coexist with the everyday, where Odysseus is one of us, and the "stern voice" of history can transform any public square into a harrowing schoolroom. This layering of times and events is also embodied in...