Poetry 2016: results

16 poetry books of the outgoing year: Gorky's choice

Many books of poetry are published every year, some of them are actively discussed by critics and readers, some remain unnoticed. At the request of Gorky, Lev Oborin conducts an audit and tells us which books of the outgoing year are worth paying attention to.

Every year more noteworthy poetry books are published in Russia than one person can read. There are, however, authors whose caliber is immediately clear - at least based on their previous merits; There are also excellent debuts that are hard to pass by. The following list is, of course, subjective; it could have been expanded by several points, and to those authors who were not included in it (as well as to their fans), I mentally apologize. I have previously reviewed some of the collections presented here, and I plan to write about one in more detail - one way or another, I tried to avoid repetitions.

The list does not include new editions of long-dead authors or reissues of classics - therefore, for example, books by Arkady Dragomoshchenko (he died in 2012) and an anthology of transfurists are presented (Ry Nikonova and Sergei Sigei passed away in 2014, A. Nik - in 2011), but there is neither an annotated volume of Pushkin published by the New Publishing House, nor the last collection of Vasily Kamensky , nor a two-volume work by the little-known poet and critic of the “Silver Age” Evgeniy Arkhippov , although I heartily recommend all three publications. Translated books were also left off the list.

The authors are named in alphabetical order.

Mikhail Aizenberg. Six. M.: Vremya, 2016.

A large selection of one of the main living Russian poets. Six books that allow you to see how, from the stuffiness that surrounded the poet and his circle in the last Soviet decades, Eisenberg’s voice emerged into the air - and, shaking off the need for hermeticism, did not lose a grain of precision. Today's Eisenberg is able to speak directly and sharply (“This is me, poetry about the homeland. / This is in case you didn’t understand”), but for the most part his new poems work like sensitive sensors that pick up the emotions, sensations, anxieties scattered around us:

***

Today the air is like training camp,
slightly covered with snow,
and smokeless gunpowder in the yards
walks with fresh powder.

Ozone interferes with anxiety,
rotting in the depths of the soul.
She is miserable even in silence
not sleeping, counting floors:

how, overcoming the emptiness,
to an underground city without lights
the elevator shaft is leaving;
how the air reaches for her.

Vladimir Aristov. Open courtyards. M.: New Literary Review, 2016.

Selected poems by Aristov are located here, as critic Olga Balla writes, “almost descending”: from 2012 to 1972 - and only at the end do poems from 2014–2015 appear again. This structure of the book is perhaps cinematic: the later texts look like riddles that can be resolved by subsequent reading; in the finale, the poet, recalling his entire journey, seems to open his eyes, transformed by this experience. However, Aristov’s poems throughout his entire journey are characterized by a common feature: it is convenient to call it not even fragmentation or fragmentation, but the ability to snatch the plot, the basis for a poem, out of thin air, from the place to which the poet’s gaze is now directed. This is far from anecdotal akinism, even if one of Aristov’s last books bears the subtitle “simple-minded poems”: the space he looks at is full of reasons for expression and delight, and it seems that that comprehending power of gaze, observation, which we know from great European poets of recent decades - Milosz, Tranströmer, Kaplinsky - Aristov combines with rare energy.

***

White night volleyball
plaster your bodies
lingered in the air

Even tomorrow or today
to the factory again

even if they cut it off
interest rates
the chips will break
in turning detail

but here in ardent dedication
in this
being
Where is repetition without exception?

for drops of alcohol
life until it falls apart
on an icy bench -
faithful bodies left in the white air
no night no derogatory
no sleep at all

Vadim Bannikov. I've been here from the very beginning. M.: ARGO-Risk; Book Review, 2016.

A complete collection of Bannikov’s texts would probably fit into a book the size of a large encyclopedic dictionary: he writes constantly , and a 48-page debut book cannot exhaust the variety of his texts, so we are looking at Bannikov rather through the eyes of the compiler (Nikita Sungatov). The speed at which these verses appear corresponds to the speed at which news feeds are updated in the modern media space; the flow of Bannikov’s texts captures both phobias associated with the future (here it looks like an unattractive, but short-lived dystopia), and schizophrenic rushing from one news agenda to another. All this is interspersed with short remarks about the private circumstances of the speaker’s life - they serve, in Dmitry Kuzmin’s terminology, as “zones of opaque meaning.” There is no reliable language here: as soon as any stylistic array arises that threatens to crush the reader with its totalitarianism, Bannikov makes a hole in it, even if for this he needs to “sacrifice himself”:

***

Briefcases, punks, and women's bags are allowed into the courthouse
explosive, flammable, poisonous and narcotic substances
for the purpose of providing medical care
Police officers are allowed into the courthouse

having considered the demand for payment of tax
established to collect taxes
within the amounts specified in the tax payment request
Advisor to the State Civil Service of the Russian Federation

Bannikov V.A.

Vasily Borodin. We and the eyes. Vladivostok: niding.publ.UnLTd, 2016.

“Losiny Ostrov” was one of the most remarkable poetry collections of 2015: the Andrei Bely Prize and the Moscow Account Prize confirmed Borodin’s highest reputation among his colleagues. Now he has published a small book of new poems. The combination of song rhythms and unexpected images might have only a fleeting effect; the enormous empathy with which Borodin fills his poems offers the reader a much more powerful experience. Whatever the reviewers say, “We and the Eyes” is by no means just “poetry of observation”: he gets used to those whom Borodin observes, be it a cucumber, a dove, a night thief or an old horse.

***
time of pure joy
slouchy day
the evening is frail
meet: this is the sky of Moscow

very nice, we are snowdrifts
I really want to sleep
Don't start a late-night conversation:
in the morning the silence will be clearer

cleaner, happier.
yes, that's the sound of a shovel scraping snow

Oksana Vasyakina. Women's prose. M.: ARGO-Risk; Book Review, 2016.

The provocative title of Oksana Vasyakina’s debut book does not immediately make it possible to understand what kind of poems are in front of us and how they will speak to us. “Women's prose” is a disparaging cliché, still in use when we are talking about something frivolous, romantic, and, of course, written by a lady. The poetry of Oksana Vasyakina opposes this cliché - not in the sense that it asserts the equality of “love and everyday life” with sublime poetic themes, but in the sense that it forces us to re-evaluate both parts of the common expression: female - that is, on behalf of, or rather, from a woman's point of view; prose - because Vasyakina’s poems, devoid of many signs of conventional lyrics, balance between confessionalism and sociality. Oksana Vasyakina gives a voice to those who are rarely thought of by consumers of clichés: workers, migrants, victims of violence, the huge audience of central TV channels in quiet despair. She tells her own stories and confronts others.

***

Migrant bodies shoulder to shoulder
In a twelve-seater minibus,
The windows are not open, the curtains are tucked.
They say this is the land of the free
This is the country where we can work
And hug your women anywhere,
In the subway, in squares and holidays, this is our country, this is our freedom.
Death of migrants on the rails.
Bakeries increase production of lavash
And vodka.

He says look how Muslims
After sex they wash themselves:
First the mouth - three times, the nose - three times and the whole body,
So that there is no dry place left

There's no room left, they say, there are black-assed, stupid animals all around,
They eat their bread, listen to their radio, do dull work -
Death to migrants.

The death of migrants under the scorching sun
On fresh asphalt
Behind the piston of a second-rate catering dishwasher,
Slipping on a teenager's vomit.

He sings: when I get home,
I will bring you money, beloved Zaura,
In the meantime, I live in a two-room apartment with thirty of our brothers,
I sleep with them in turns.
And if death does not overtake me on the rails,
I'll bring you a vase
I'll bring a scarf from Moscow.

Alla Gorbunova. While the alphabet is burning out. M.: New Literary Review, 2016.

One critic accused Alla Gorbunova of adhering to the “poetics of enumeration,” but here it’s like Sherlock Holmes: “you should have put a plus, but you put a minus.” The listings and catalogs that the reader encounters in this book serve to build tension - and the device invariably works in texts that are so far apart in their poetic properties that it is difficult to believe that they were written by one person. Alla Gorbunova's fourth book presents a poet capable of “self-winding,” but at the same time knowing exactly at what moment the music will stop. The best poems of this book convey freedom, understood as self-sufficiency: they reject outsiders, because they have more than enough of their own - what has been accumulated by the experience of writing, working with mythology, unspent anger:

A LITTLE HYMN TO ANGER AND JOY

rejoice, my wrath,
be angry, my joy,
there is no place for us on a false holiday.
my joy, dressed up like a bride,
My joyful anger, laugh in the barracks,
crying flame,
amen!
My anger is beautiful, like a hydrogen bomb,
my joy hidden in the catacombs,
together with the gods with aimed fire
splash like Veronica's hair,
my life-giving anger,
deadly joy
dique!
lighter wings of the dragonfly bet, beautiful
my anger, leaving the false holiday,
you, my crazy joy,
Hello!
fight like a turtle dove, spin like a top,
mad dervish, Russian dance,
wild wasps, the axis of the earth,
on the barricades by the working class,
lying drunk with anger in a ditch,
there is no place for us on a false holiday.
angry joy
rejoice, my wrath,
ave!

Dmitry Danilov. Two states. NY: Ailuros Publishing, 2016.

Danilov’s prose is almost the limit of descriptiveness as such, our approach to the “new novel” with the specifics of Russian realities; If “Horizontal Position” caused indignation at one time, then after “Description of a City” it became clear that we are dealing with a special language - the more you read, the more likely you are to enjoy it. Danilov’s poetry logically continues his prose - and makes his entire method clearer: broken into short lines, these texts appear as an accurate shorthand of “ordinary” thought. Everyday life, however, is different for everyone: if Vsevolod Nekrasov achieved the effect of “flying” from one thought to another, leaving a very noticeable sparseness between them, then Danilov tries not to miss anything - and nevertheless from the tedious enumeration of actions (trips on trains, buses) , watching football matches), a meaning grows out of the soil: at first glance it seems secondary, but then it turns out that it is the main one.

In Vykhino in a carriage
No need to sit down
Three stops in total
It's going to be crowded
Then you won’t be able to squeeze through to the exit
It's better to just get up
At the exit, next to the exit
And stand at the exit, don’t leave
Deep into the carriage
Three stops in total
Relatives, acquaintances
Ryazansky Avenue
Kuzminki
And textile workers
Until we got to Tekstilshchiki
There were a lot of people crowded
But we managed to defend
Position near the exit
And get out

Tekstilshchiki platform
This refers to the train platform
How many times have you been here
Used this platform
I got on the train here
And went to Podolsk
To Tolik
While he was still alive
This was in 2013 - 2014
I took the train to Podolsk
Walked to the final stop
Trolleybuses 1 and 2
By then usually
Already called several times
Where are you, oh where are you, where
He said it
Not very clear
Illness was taking its toll
It was difficult for him to speak
Clearly
I must admit, these calls
Caused irritation
Well, I'm on my way, why are you calling?
I'm standing at the end
At Podolsk station
When I get there I'll call you
And then he
Called several times
Well, where are you, what, when
Damn it, I'm on a trolleybus
When I get there I'll call you
And again there was irritation
Why is he calling
“Okay,” Tolik answered humbly.
Call when you arrive
And here it would be possible
Put some reasoning
What do we say we don’t appreciate?
Habits of your loved ones
We get annoyed with them
But it seems like it should be
Value
So Tolik died
And now I would pay dearly
For this irritation

Arkady Dragomoshchenko. The great monotony of love. St. Petersburg: Palmira, 2016.

Arkady Dragomoshchenko is known primarily as a “complex” (some would say “dark”) poet, who instilled the manner of the American “language school” into the Russian tradition: Dragomoshchenko’s late poems are uniquely rich mental landscapes, consisting of many messages, consequences, subordinate clauses. All this is subject to strict logic, which, with careful reading, allows you to understand it; poetic and philosophical passion is located very deep under the layer of writing - like the earth's core under a layer of water and rocks. The collection “The Great Monotony of Love,” compiled by the poet’s widow, includes mainly early poems and presents another Dragomoshchenko, a high European modernist; the purity and clarity of his thoughts is comparable to Trakl or Tranströmer. The collection is filled with observations and memories that can be trusted by the interlocutor. When this is a love speech, it does not matter that its content is already known to the beloved - if we put the “erased” words about love in quotation marks and build on them, then the further message will become news:

"My beloved."
When
ten years ago I met you,
It seemed that I met my brother. I
wondered at night, stretched out in bed:
Window. Rain tree -
Your hands
They were the same as mine.
The shoulders were the same.
We spoke the same language
And in the morning, when everyone in the house was still asleep,
Trying not to creak the floorboards,
(they never changed it, and then the house was demolished)
They slipped out into the street.
And they walked side by side, surprising passers-by with their similarity.
How beautiful in your agreement
the morning shadows rushed behind us -
your breath, which continued my breathing.
How effortlessly our hands touched each other!
“My love,” how light our bodies were.

Gennady Kanevsky. Session. M.: TG Ivan-chai, 2016.

This included poems from all of Kanevsky’s previous books and new things. The poetry of Gennady Kanevsky, a prominent person in the literary landscape of Moscow, has not been properly comprehended by criticism. His poetics, if described without examples, may seem internally contradictory, but in fact its elements form a strong alloy: the poems are unconditionally masculine - but not brutal; one feels sentimentality - but ironic. Their drive is ensured by stoicism, a readiness to be present at a catastrophe - personal or historical - and describe it, defamiliarizing with a grin or simply the beauty of prosody.

[simple ballad]

when it's the seventh day in a row
young and old are noisy,
when the detachment arrives
take away your joys -
give the fire back from the hearth,
give away your work and days,
reject both friend and enemy,
but save the ashes -

the flying haze of gray days,
the melancholy of jacket shoulders.
you said it was a speech
but this is no, not speech,
and onion peel
and the ashes of your fathers,
and fabulous Shamakhi -
haven of eunuchs.

all oaths (that is, kol nidrei)
and all vows are gone.
verbal garbage, rustle, sway
they go into the night with you.
over there with food and drink
the bosses are standing
and you stayed with Smith,
and this is why you are rich.

under the whisper of Kurkuli,
near Kharkov Makhno,
and you crawl along the path of the earth,
and then it’s all the same
where, thundering, on fire,
fear rushes through the night
in a gray uninhabited country
on dark trains.

Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov. Soviet texts. St. Petersburg: Ivan Limbach Publishing House, 2016.

Against the backdrop of a grandiose five-volume collection of works (the third volume has just been published in UFO), a reissue of Limbach’s old collection has appeared - a kind of essential: here is a policeman, and the image of Reagan in Soviet literature, and “a woman kicked me in the subway,” and “attentively if you take a closer look today.” This collection has a double bottom. Of course, Prigov’s “Soviet” texts demonstrate his strategy for victory over the total Soviet language: mocking, parody, speaking “from behind a mask” - and a special ambivalence, when neither the reader, nor even the author himself is able to decide whether the speech is a joke or serious . It is this ambivalence that provides the deep sincerity of many of Prigov’s texts (for example, “A kilogram of fish salad...”) . One gets the feeling that Prigov recognizes the potential of that language/way of life, which at the same time he is ironic about.

As I understand it, in a planned system, exceeding the plan is sabotage
Let's say a lace factory exceeded the number of laces five times

And the shoe factory only exceeded the plan twice
In addition, where should we put the overfilled laces?

And it turns out that this is a waste of public funds
and defamation of noble deeds
For this we are supposed to be shot

Sergey Soloviev. Love. Drafts. M.: ARGO-Risk; Book Review, 2016.

One of the two books by Sergei Solovyov published this year seems to be designed to solve a problem that is often talked about: the lack of development of erotic language in Russian literature. They talk about the problem, and not about its content, precisely because it is still little accepted to talk about sex as something joyful and essentially necessary: ​​in poetry, for the most part, there are either euphemistic half-hints, or direct obscenity, or protocol descriptions. Solovyov smelches his own eerotic edition from the words, where a woman is deified, mythologizes (“her little brushes, like cards of Siberian rivers, / and in her palms - quiet, summer. She is sneaked / with them. She curls with a spindle under you, / like sable, Playing, saying goodbye to life. Sex in Solovyov’s poems resembles myths of creation - they seem to remind us that lovers can still feel omnipotent.

***

She pushes him with her tight stomach in front of herself.
And he waves his head in a bucket of happiness - to the bottom.
She hangs him upside down
And groans with unearthly flowers.
Her face is distorted by beauty.
She takes out his soul from him like a branch
And throws into the fire: words boil with juice.
She sees the child, rejected, he is not here.
He sees women, they are not here.
And the country, and the house, and the road is not here.
She takes his feelings, looks
throws on the table like cards:
Everyone is open, only one - a shirt up.
Is it? Or not among them it?
She returns to him that she did not take.
And he enters him as if he had not come out.
She lies in him - from his heels to the hair,
Breathes him with his mouth, drives next to him with his hand,
Clutching her into a fist, exhausting.

Nina Stavrogina. Break line. M.: Argo-Risk; Book Review, 2016.

In the verses of Nina Stavrogina, you can hear both the detachment characteristic of many young poets from the direct “I” rescue, a restrained, almost impassive tone, and the taste for the language game, which does not allow you to forget that reading verses can be a pleasure. Unlike many authors of this generation, Stavrogin prefers “short breathing”: the sound of its texts is related to the sound of one of the largest Norwegian poets of Tour Ulven, whom she translated a lot ( http://polutona.ru/?show=0217204254 ).

***

Spark,
Danoy
Truths,
glides with grain
On the tributary messages:
Clay will look
Supporting the eye -
And it will spread
In the Bezravity: Marriage
Not consumed

It doesn't step here
beast,
Unless
The plant will give up
doomed disputes;
Through a lot
prayer years
would be born, maybe
toads -
But in the world,
What are these tubers
feel a muddy gaze,
Nobody needs it
Stones from their heads,
And Pluto is not a planet
and death
No

Transfurists. Selected texts. M.: Gileya, 2016.

The anthology of the poets related to the journal Transponance: despite the fact that many were published in this key for the late Soviet vanguard, many were printed by the nucleus of the transfurist movement were four - ry Nikonov, Sergey Sigiga, A. Nick and Boris Consistent. Of these four, only the latter is now approved, and the anthology was compiled with its active participation (the main compiler was the poet and philologist Peter Kazarnovsky). The book covers the whole breadth of poetic techniques that transfurists used: here you can find a “classic” um, and visual poetry, and high absurdism, sometimes becoming completely transparent:

***
I don't go to the forest
There is a gray wolf with a decree
I don't go to the sea -
I'm afraid of shark eyes
I don't bother the steppe -
there the locust
All that's left is
Own body -
I sit in it

(Ry Nikonov)

“I dream of dissolving literary material in the page plane so that the area of ​​the poem becomes its only content,” said Nikonova, and this attitude is related by her practice ( http://www.blyprize.ru/?pid=75 ), with One side, with a utopia of the “projective verse” of Charles Olson, and on the other, with the whole huge history of Russian visual poetry of the 20th century, from Vasily Kamensky and Vasilisk Gnedov to Alexander Gornon. Of course, in the context of the history of the avant -garde, the entire anthology of transfurists who directly inherit the “Gileis” futurists and the Oeriutes (constiter about the youngest of the Oberiuts - Igor Bakhterev: “Bakhterev / Igor Prince / his / s / world / Slavic Vyaz” is also read. At the same time - possibly, due to a greater approximation to the irony of our era, to its tongue, it is very fun to read the transubrasts:

***
muffled - manual shock
Drefallic animal
Similar to the castan
or love
bran
IOK's heads
In the battle of Cannes
Restless daughter
Ironias are an hour

(Sergey Sigai)

Leave. Stay. Live. Anthology of literary readings “They're Gone. They remained ”(2012–2016). M.: Litgost, 2016.

“They left. They remained ”-a cycle of literary evenings, conceived by the poet and literary studies Boris Kutenkov and Irina Medvedeva-the mother of the poet Ilya Tyurina, who died in 1999 (in his honor, Medvedeva founded“ Ilya-Primea ”, noticeable in the 2000s of the institution). The compilers of the anthology are moved by a noble impulse - not to allow the poets who died young (up to forty years), not only to collect their texts, but also to comprehend their place in poetry. Here you can meet the names that are familiar to readers of Russian poetry (Anna Gorenko, Denis Novikov, Alexei Kolchev, Andrei Turkin, Evgeny Khorvat, Ruslan Elinin), and those authors who did not have time to see recognition during life. The meeting is, of course, uneven: if in the verses of those who left at a younger age, the promise of something outstanding is more likely, then among those who survived the third ten, there are truly significant poets-for example, Croat, Kolchev, Vasily Kondratyev (a separate edition of his poems has just been released in the “Word Order”). It is worth noting one more point: it is unclear whether the compilers deliberately choose those verses that persistently talk about death, as if predicting it, or we really are dealing with the force of foreboding. One way or another, anthology deserves close attention.

***

Hugging his unloved in the night -
We remember our beloved:
far beyond the seas of city lights
We left them.

And now do not teach me how to live in the mind -
It’s better for me forever alone.
But let me, in the end, will hug you -
Before in darkness.

(Sergey Korolev)

Oleg Yuryev. Poems and choruses of recent times. M.: New Literary Review, 2016.

A few accessible formal, language filigran Oleg Yuryev put to the service a tireless conversation about the space in which life and culture take place. It can be the last -sunk and suddenly dreamed of Leningrad, behind whose bridges and parks you can see a different poetic culture that Yuryev resurrects and exalts: the culture of the Oberiuts, Alika Rivin, Leonid Aronzon. It can be Germany, devoid of those expensive and painful connotations, and suddenly, for a moment, appearing to the poet as his own paradise. It can be a difficult homeland, from which there is no way to get away with the fact of birth and language.

Poems about the homeland (2)

1.

Our homeland is water.
She is drawn by a net
The nets are scooped up.

We live at the bottom of the water.

Our homeland is the Earth.
Her, the roots of the Shevel,
Eats a night tree.

We go through his door.

2.

Our homeland is a movie,
Where both damp and dark
And on a wall square
Soldiers fall

In the river, black as blood.
You slightly shift the eyebrow:
- Is this our homeland?
- This is our homeland.

A river burns on the wall,
Your lips have your hand
Without rings and without rings ...
... but it seems that this is not the end

Lida Yusupova. Dead Dad. Tver: Kolonna Publications, 2016.

The poems of Lida Yusupova, the poetess living in Belize, are most often devoted to violence - the most direct, destructive, physical. As soon as violence is a political category, it is, without a doubt, political poems. The central thing in the new book of Yusupova - amazing power cycle composed of phrases that are found in real sentences of the court in cases of murder and bodily harm (“Vagina is not a vital body”). The injuries compared with meat, with the imaginary horror of a person who is killed somewhere in the forest, these stationery phrases themselves look no better than the instruments of the murder. The cycle is preceded by the dedication of the victim of the homophobic murder Vitaly Igorevich Mingazov: “Dear Vitaliy Igorevich, forgive me that I am writing about you, calling your name, telling you about you. I want you to be alive and I know nothing about you. <...> I do not understand why you could hate you. I do not understand the very opportunity to hate you. Dear Vitaly Igorevich, let me tell you: I love you. " Two more poems of the collection - memories of sexual violence; In the first case, it is obscured, mediated by pity and consent (the speaker recalls the case when she was asked to deprive the virginity of the young man who, a few days later, had to leave to fight in Afghanistan, where he would die; it should be said that the followed scene is terrible, anti -erotic); In the second - it is leaning undressed; Before us is a story with a bad end where only one thing remains the heroine:

If the youngster was at home, Mateyuk would not raped me
I'm unlucky
And when he returned, he silently lay on me and we had sex, I did not
I resisted, I just said it wrong, I repeated it
this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong
this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong
this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong
this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong
this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong
This is wrong.