My Sister - Life (European Poetry Classics)

Some of our strongest poets are those who energize the material things and concrete sensations of daily life in special ways. Objects set apart by poetic imagination and power become sacred and establish a bond between the reader as perceiver and the thing perceived. By extension the bond opens the reader to an entire universe of ensouled matter--a new way of looking at the world.Such is the poetry of Boris Pasternak in this 1917 book written at the height of The Great War and on the eve of the October Revolution. Pasternak's spirited materialism predates William Carlos Williams's concept "No ideas but in things."Pasternak sets many of these poems in concretely described locations where his magical materialism can go to work. In "The Flies of the Moochkap Teahouse,"The spirit sweats--the horizon'stobacco-tinged--like thoughtWindmills image a fishing villageBoats and weathered nets.This poet's world view of ensouled materiality provides a unique perspective on the new century just beginning. Each reader must decide for him or herself just how prescient or prophetic Pasternak's "The Definition of Soul" was to become.It falls like a ripe pear into the stormwith a single clinging leafHow faithful--it quits its branch--reckless--it chokes in the heat.We learn much about Pasternak from his later novel and the film (Dr. Zhivago) it spawned--but we don't experience his power as a poet. He was possibly the the most poetically powerful of figures in what is known as the Silver Age of Russian Literature, including Marina Tsvetaeva  Selected Poems (Tsvetaeva, Marina) (Twentieth-Century Classics) , Osip Mandelstam  Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (New York Review Books Classics) , Anna Akhmatova  Anna Akhmatova (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets) , and Nikolai Gumilyov  The Pillar of Fire , among the most talented and brilliant poets of the twentieth century. They bore the brunt of the Soviet regime's ideological attacks and physical repression.Here is poetic brilliance and talent of the first rank--the power of poetry of material things on display.