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A review by savaging
The Selected Poems by Осип Мандельштам, W.S. Merwin, Clarence Brown, Osip Mandelstam
5.0
Mandelstam once said: "Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?" He wrote some non-conforming stanzas and ergo died in transit to a Soviet labor camp, after living for years in exile. (My favorite line of his about Stalin is: "He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. / He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.")
I don't love Mandelstam's early poetry, about honey and tree boughs and birds in flight. So I'm also complicit, because what morphs these words into magic is his terror. Instead of musing on Persephone's bees he begins to write:
I don't love Mandelstam's early poetry, about honey and tree boughs and birds in flight. So I'm also complicit, because what morphs these words into magic is his terror. Instead of musing on Persephone's bees he begins to write:
No, it’s not for me to duck out of the messHis work is spectacular.
behind the cabdriver’s back that’s Moscow.
I’m the cherry swinging from the streetcar strap of an evil time. What am I doing alive?
We’ll take Streetcar A and then Streetcar B,
you and I, to see who dies first.
You took away all the oceans and all the room.
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.