Muddy River ─ Selected Poems

From the canals of St Petersburg, the steppes of Central Asia, the mountains of the Caucasus, and the landscape of Palestine, this collection from award-winning Russian poet Sergey Stratanovsky is overtly conscious of the continuing dislocations and evolutions of the times. A writer since the late 1960s, Stratanovsky's poetry has changed in form over the years, but always maintained a strong sociological eye and a deeply religious soul. From poems about the Chechen War to poems based on the Old Testament, a constant tension lies in his work between external environments physical, political, sociological and internal landscapes, and his writing is thematically diverse, responding to the myths and folklore of the peoples of Russia and beyond. Complete with an introduction by translator J. Kates, Muddy River brings together the poems from Stratanovsky's previous seven collections, published here in English for the first time.

J. Kates is a poet and literary translator who lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire In 1968 Stratanovsky graduated from Leningrad University. He worked as a tour-guide at the Pushkin Museum, the Hermitage and from 1983 as a librarian at the Russian National Library. He became well known through the anthology Apollon-77 and in The Blue Lagoon Anthology of Russian Poetry (1983). His first pubication inside Russia was in the collection Krug (1985). In 1981, together with Kyril Butyrin, he created a samizdat political-literary journal in Leningrad, The Obvodny [Bypass] Canal, which produced eighteen issues until 1993. He is a member of the Union of Writers in Saint Petersburg and PEN-International.