Olga Sedakova (Poems and Elegies) began writing poetry at an early age. In the 1970s, when the Soviet government preferred she and her fellow Russian poets cease their art, they went underground. Until 1990, her poetry was available only as samizdat--handwritten copies that were secretly passed from reader to reader. The '90s brought dramatic change and her work was widely published in Russian. Thanks to a group of translators and Open Letter Books, some of her work and her ideas about art and poetry are now available to English-speaking readers.
In Praise of Poetry is a potpourri. There are two sections of her poetry: "Old Songs," a group of early, individual pieces, and poems from her "Tristan and Isolde" sequence. Also included is her essay "In Praise of Poetry," an interview and her brief acceptance speech for her 2011 Master's Prize in Translation (on Rilke and Eliot: "These I love and I want to convey my love for them to Russian readers").
Her poetry draws deeply on Russian cultural and religious traditions. Poems in the first section reveal a deceptive, prayer-like simplicity, a piety reflective of monastic chroniclers. The opening piece in "Tristan and Isolde" invites us to "sew a dress of darkness,/ a monk's cloak of old." Purposefully avoiding the story's famous plot, she offers up poetic digressions, an act that she calls "tracing out of the air." These are rich, thoughtful, meditative poems exquisitely rendered. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher