Holy winter 20/21

In "A Servant to Servants," Robert Frost observed "The best way out is always through." Written after she was forced to leave Cambridge and return to Moscow at the dreadful beginning of COVID-19, Russian poet Stepanova's new works prove, yet again, that sometimes the way forward is back, into the past; and down, deep into texts. Ovid, Sir John Mandeville, and Hans Christian Andersen are just a few of the recognizable writers who figure in this collection's chorus that develops like a cantata. Slowly, as if the lights come up on stage, one can identify the singers. Stepanova is best known for her memoir, In Memory of Memory (2021), which was short-listed for the International Booker Prize and long-listed for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Poet and translator Dugdale does magnificent service to this remarkable writer. Holy Winter is full of wonderful, odd, idiomatic English: "If time had a pocket / Then place me in it, gently." One hears echoes of Alice Oswald's extraordinary reimagining of classical texts, and Inger Christensen's epic formal inventions.

The moving, polyvocal latest from Stepanova (War of the Beasts and the Animals) is a book-length snowscape sequence that blends voices of fracture and love, evoking Ovid in exile and other historical touchstones, from Baron Munchausen to Hans Christian Andersen. Skillfully rendered by Dugdale, the air in these poems is infused with such dangers as "Airborne particles of frost ash/ Tiny cavalry officers" (noncoincidentally, the book was written during Covid-19 lockdowns). There is a feeling of arrest in these pages ("We, wrapped in snow for safe-keeping/ Like pictures overlaid with glassine,/ Suddenly came to a stop"), but there's equally a difficult hopefulness, the voices reaching for "that place where misfortune is not known," however forlorn their searching. It adds up to a finely woven exercise in vocalization that always looks toward redemption, or at least respite, from its shocking precarity: "if time has a pocket then place me in it, gently." A political undertow--including mentions of "the god of anger" and "one/ Whose power is equal with that of the gods"--adds to the collection's depth. Bound together by a gently thoughtful steeliness, these poetic utterances are at once plaintive and resolute. (May)