​

Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky; selections from this book project (forthcoming from Cleveland State) have been published in Poetry, New England Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Artful Dodge, The Journal, Guernica, North American Review, Two Lines and Two Lines Online. Tarkovsky’s work emerges from a visionary sensibility—like Akhmatova and Mandelstam—that became his way of forging a Russian art outside of Soviet realism. Of course, it’s the music of the poems that guaranteed his reputation, as much as the vision. Speaking of Soviet poetry during an interview toward the end of her life, Anna Akhmatova called Arseny Tarkovsky the one “real poet.” In her words, in 1965, “of all contemporary poets Tarkovsky alone is completely his own self, completely independent. He possesses the most important feature of a poet which I’d call the birthright....” In a time when Russian poetry was anything but independent, Tarkovsky’s verse maintained its resolute allegiance to his own poetic vision.

Tarkovsky lived from 1907 until 1989, and spent most of his life as a translator of Turkmen, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, and other Asian poets, only publishing his own poems after Stalin’s death (beginning in 1962). Of a younger generation than Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Tsvetaeva, he both absorbed the Silver Age tradition and hearkened back to the simple and primordial music of Pushkin. He was wounded in World War II, lost a leg to gangrene, and wrote some of the most powerful poems about the Second World War. Later, his son Andrei became an internationally celebrated filmmaker; in a number of his great films, Andrei features his father’s poems, demonstrating the aesthetic continuation of the Russian tradition from poetry to film.

Philip Metres is the author of a number of books, most recently A Concordance of Leaves (2013), abu ghraib arias (2011), this year’s winner of the Arab American Book Award in poetry; To See the Earth (2008), Come Together: Imagine Peace (2008), and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront, Since 1941(University of Iowa Press, 2007). His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, and has garnered two NEAs, the Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and four Ohio Arts Council Excellence grants. He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Dimitri Psurtsev,  is a Russian poet and translator living in Moscow.