Daniel Weissbort’s gracious and sensible introduction to this enlightening anthology acknowledges all the editorial problems such a project must face. There’s the challenge of representing the literature of not only a vast nation but its émigrés and exiles too; the politics of compiling an anthology of women poets, which, he admits, meant that some of those invited were ‘reluctant to be included or excluded themselves’; and, not least, the ‘notoriously difficult’ process of turning Russian into English. Weissbort’s claim, then, is not for an exhaustive survey, but one that might ‘diversify’ existing perceptions of post-Soviet Russian women’s poetry.

Some of the work here is instantly satisfying. In Kabysh’s ‘Making Jam in July’, the description of a woman ‘in all the chaos of a steamy kitchen’ taps into a long history of domesticity as both wound and salve: ‘Whoever’s making jam in Russia / knows there isn’t a way out.’ This mingled sense of country-love and entrapment recurs elsewhere, as in Walcott’s translation of Pavlova’s intense ‘[This is the way a row of official tulips]’, where the forbidden tulips ‘hoping they’ll be picked up when it gets dark’ lead us to ‘a girl’s vagina, weeping’ and finally to the declaration that, ‘This is the way I pray “Don’t let me live in Russia,” / knowing well my prayers will not be answered.’ Political upheaval, inevitably, provides a lot of subject matter, but there’s a persistent playfulness too, especially when it comes to writing itself, as in Belchenko’s ‘I’m bored looking at the same old contents / Of my very own vocabulary’, or Ezrokhi’s admonition, ‘Poet, do not fear tautologies… // How sunny, sunny is the sun!’

But any anthology of translation – especially of poets whose work has never been freely available in English before, like most of the contributors here – is also a chance to diversify our perceptions of poetry itself. We glimpse other ways of writing, of seeing, that are at first hardly recognisable. And so, on first read, a lot of these poems seem wild, or presumptuous, or naïve. Few would dare write in native English, ‘My soul is like a kite / and the string is in your hands’, as Olga Sulchinskaya does; we tiptoe around that word, ‘soul’, blackened as it is with sentiment. But here, as part of an alternate tradition, we have to look at ‘soul’ anew; and at Kuznetsova’s ‘destiny’ (‘I’m trying to fit my destiny into / the eye of a needle, like a pony / into the tightly drawn square collar’), and many more banished abstracts and techniques. Sometimes it takes a foreign tongue to reconnect us to our own.

© Frances Leviston