Brodsky, The Selected Poetry of (Penguin modern European poets)

Russian-English bilingual edition. Translated by Robert Reid, Daniel Weissbort & Carol Rumens / Yuri Drobyshev. Born in 1935, Evgeny Rein belongs to that tragic generation of Russian poets who for decades went unpublished in the Soviet Union. One of Akhmatova's ""magic choir"" of young Leningrad poets, he was Joseph Brodsky's mentor and lifetime friend. Brodsky figures in many of his poems, and Brodsky's essay on Rein introduces this edition: ""Rein is the most gifted Russian poet of the second half of the 20th century..Rein not only radically extended the poetic vocabulary and sound palette of Russian poetry; he also broadened and shook up the psychological sweep of Russian lyrics. He is an elegist, but of a tragic stripe."" ""Rein is unquestionably an elegiac poet. His main theme is the end of things, the end, to put it more broadly, of a world order that is dear-or at least acceptable-to him. The incarnation of this order in his poetry is the city in which he grew up, the city of Leningrad..Few among his compatriots would dispute the depth of the despair and exhaustion that darkens these poems.""-Joseph Brodsky