Siberia has been always linked in the British imagination with violent and wintry extremes - exile, snow, howling wolves, salt-mines, Gulags and sub-zero temperatures. Rasputin was born in Siberia. Lenin was exiled there. Mandelstam died there. Maxim Gorky once called it ‘a land of chains and ice’. But Siberia is also a place of winter magic, a land of extreme natural beauty crossing seven time zones, of ice-princesses and talking bears, frozen mammoths and the shamans who walk among the dead. For some, Siberia still represents the ‘authentic Russia’. For others it is a place of wild escape, or the place where European Russia meets Asia head-on. For 40 million Russians - including the poets in this book - Siberia represents home. Writing about their extraordinary country, they have adapted Russian literary traditions to its exceptional conditions. There are the love lyrics of Maxim Ukolov, the imagist verse of Sergey Samoylenko, the experimental poetry of Igor Loshilov and Viktor Ivaniv, and the strange, magical free verse of Igor Davletshin. Five poets and five aesthetic and linguistic experiences, united only by the weather. "Treat this volume with caution."— Poetry ReviewPoems from “…a land of chains and ice."— Maxim Gorky…each of these five authors moves in his own direction, extending the common area and extending our notion of what Siberian poetry is today. — Mikhail EizenbergYana Glembotskaya has published widely on English and Russian literature. Oleg Burkov is currently studying twentieth-century Russian avant-garde poetry at the State Pedagogical University in Novosibirsk.
'Wonderfully bleak... a vivid and oddly bracing dose of Russian pessimism.'
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