Far from Sodom (Paperback)

I breathe out memory. To breathe it in, For now, a new epoch is needed, Or a new window may suffice - With a different aspect, laurelled roads, Where the setting sun deposits, Its birth-mark on me. This is like a postage stamp or the word 'Furniture' on the side of a van, And the brand-mark on cattle, - I'd like to be whoever, whatever, If only to move from the dead point, dead-end, And find the exit therefrom. But probably it's where it first was. Where later they crowned thorns with myrrh, That country, I don't know it now, Or city, where Lot alone was pared? All in all I must transcend, The intersecting lines of this window! This is the most substantial selection of Inna Lisnianskaya's work to be published in England to date, in a translation by Daniel Weissbort that Elaine Feinstein describes in her illuminating introduction as 'clean, clear and...amazingly felicitous'. Lisnianskaya, an intensely lyrical poet, is first and foremost a love poet, and the love that she and her late husband, the celebrated poet Semyon Lipkin, had for one another colours - without the least sentimentality - many of Lisnianskaya's more recent poems. Indeed, her most recent collection consists partly of an elegy to him.