Review
Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.
With short measured breaths and hands darting about in poetic deliverance, a lone poet casts words to the air that each condense into a moment whose consequences will weigh on him for the rest of his life. His identity, now virtually unknown, claws at a half-empty audience, not for money, but for the next batch of cigarettes that might last him through the night. His calling is more than an augur’s foretelling; it is a craft that describes the events surrounding him in vivid detail, replete with morals and a naturalism that cuts to the core of things in an age that needed it most. But it is this craft that will cast him into dungeons far darker than the seedy cabaret where he delivers his sermons for meager alms; it will ruin...
Beyond the Book
Russia’s Poetic Troika
Born in Odessa, Russia in 1889,
Anna Akhmatova began writing poems at the age of 11, adopting her grandmother's surname because her father would not permit her to publish under his own. As a member of the Acmeist school of poetry, Akhmatova achieved celebrity along with her husband, Nikolay Gumilyov, who was executed in 1921 as a counter-revolutionary. Between 1925 and 1940, all of Akhmatova's work was banned from publication in the Soviet Union. In 1930 she composed "Requiem," one of her finest and most famous poems, in dedication to the victims of the Stalinist Terror. "Requiem" was not...
