Earthly Lexicon

By Regina Derieva

"The Russian poet Regina Derieva was born
in Odessa on the Black Sea, and enjoyed the
shifting rhythms of the sea: 'Water is the ideal
apparel. However many times you get into it, it's
the same.' Her passion for water was shared by
her epistolary friend, Joseph Brodsky, who grew
up alongside St. Petersburg's canals and spent as
much time as he could in Venice, where he is buried
on the cemetery island of San Michele.Derieva,
whom Brodsky called 'a great poet', viewed
a very different landscape, however: from the
age of sixteen she lived obscurely in Karaganda,
Kazakhstan, 'perhaps the most dismal corner of
the former Soviet Union - once the centre of a
vast prison camp universe, later just a gloomy
industrial city', according to the distinguished
Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova. For him, Derieva's
precise, epigrammatic poems limn 'the
concentration camp zone, where space is turned
into emptiness, and time turned into disappearance'."
(The Times Literary Supplement)
Then followed nine fruitful years in Palestine
and fourteen (not less productive) in Sweden, alternating
with trips to various places around the
globe. Between 2002 and 2007 Regina visited the
USA often; now, in the present book, her cycle of
poems, "Northeast States", is made available in
its entirety.
Regina Derieva, who died in Stockholm in
2013, was not only a poet, but a prose writer,
translator, musician and enthusiastic amateur
conchologist. This third American collection of
her poems also contains essays, prose pieces and
the unfinished "The Normal Chaos of Things".

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1934851736
• ISBN13: 9781934851739
• Release Date: December 2019
• Publisher: Marick Press
• Length: 158 Pages
• Weight: 0.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"