Arrow in the Wall : Selected Poetry and Prose - Hardcover

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Two-thirds of the verse in this anthology by one of the USSR's most durable poets appeared in Antiworlds and The Fifth Ace (1967) and Nostalgia for the Present ( LJ 4/1/79). This edition is thus an instructive review of Voznesensky's career. The mordant and closely observed poems of the Sixties and Seventies, set in his homeland and a disorderly United States, are still his best; the more recent poems included here tend toward the sentimental. Still, the two recent autobiographical essays add valuable background, and the dual-language format is a bonus for those who wish to compare the originals with renderings by translators as diverse as Auden and Allen Ginsberg. Mary F. Zirin, Altadena, Cal.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In one of Voznesensky's new poems he laments Russian bookstores "lined with stacks/ of monolithic published hacks." Parallels between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., "two countries . . . guiltily tying nonlove's knot," emerge in another previously untranslated lyric. Striking images, searing wit and the courage to speak out mark the Russian poet's latest output, which also includes tender emotional verses to his mother and a poem about his visit to Picasso's house in the south of France shortly before the artist's death. Selections from his previous books, Antiworlds and Nostalgia for the Present, round out the poetry in this bilingual edition. There are two prose selections: "I Am Fourteen," a telling portrait of his mentor Boris Pasternak, portrayed as an "eternal adolescent," and "O," a Fellini-like montage that rhapsodizes the sculpture of Henry Moore, one of Voznesensky's idols.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.