An antidote to summer - the useless poems of Gennady Aygi

Some snowy poems as an antidote to the dog days of summer.  Jamie Olson writes informatively on the dissident form and ordinary content in his review of a new translation of Russian poems Into the Snow: Selected Poems of Gennady Aygi.  Sounds enticing.

The difference between Aygi’s ars poetica and Mandelstam’s lies in the way the two poets represent poetry itself. Both of them believe that other aspects of experience lack something essential, but while Mandelstam implies that the aesthetic power of poetry can fill that gap, Aygi dismisses even his own art as powerless. If a dissident is one who rejects the dominant ideology, then for Aygi that rejection applies in some sense to poetry as well.

On Berfrois.