Book record
Birdsong on the seabed
Elena Shvart︠s︡
Translated from Russian by Sasha Dugdale
Birdsong on the seabed, by Elena Shvart︠s︡, is a Russian poetry collection from Russia, translated by Sasha Dugdale, published by Bloodaxe in 2008. It is a Russian selection by Elena Shvarts where impossible music and submerged vision become lyric method. A bird singing underwater is the right kind of contradiction for poetry: absurd, haunting, and somehow exact. I would not ask the reader to solve this book before feeling it. The better invitation is to start with the image that will not quite explain itself, then follow the pressure of cadence, silence, and address. For this library, the book matters as more than a representative entry from Russia. It gives English-language readers another route into how poetry travels: not as a tidy report from elsewhere, but as a living encounter with local weather, historical pressure, and the privacy of a voice.
- Published
- 2008
- Publisher
- Bloodaxe
- Language
- Russian
- Country
- Russia
- ISBN
- 9781852247836