Child-and-Rose

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by Gennady Aygi,

Translated by Peter France,

Preface by Bei DAO

New Directions

Due/Published April 2003, 192 pages, paper

ISBN 0811215369

Though relatively unpublished in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s, Gennady Aygi's work has been translated into some twenty languages, and has received major acclaim through many parts of the world. Child-and-Rose is a collection of poems and prose chosen and arranged by the author and translator. Taking as its central themes childhood, sleep, and silence in relation to poetic creation, the book is divided into five sections—"Veronica's Book," "Sleep-and-Poetry," "Before and After the Book," "Silvia's World," and "Poetry-as-Silence"—all written between 1972 and 2002. 

In this collection, each poem is a carefully crafted space of language that surfaces from the heart of a poetic consciousness at "the limits of intelligibility," as the translator notes. Images of Aygi's Chuvash homeland—birches, oaks, snow, roses, fields—mix with a disrupted syntax, turns, gaps, and suspensions that all speak to a quiet stillness of being.