Winter Revels and Ever Further into the Snows

Poetry. Translated from the Russian by Peter France. Two collections of poetry in a single volume, plus 23 brief poems for drawings by Diana Obinja, from world-renowned Chuvash-Russian poet Gennady Aygi (1934-2006). WINTER REVELS AND EVER FURTHER INTO THE SNOWS is Gennady Aygi's eighth book to appear in English since 1989, all in editions prepared by Aygi's longtime friend and translator Peter France. The book includes some of the poet's final poems, Aygi's 1977 preface to Winter Revels, and a cover painting by Gennadii Gogoliuk. Norma Cole notes: "'The book of my poems' it begins. WINTER REVELS are what Gennady Aygi called his 'small-scale poems,' the streaming, rain-silvered 'light that is in darkness,' written for and with the Russian poets and artists--Mandelstam, Pasternak, Malevich--and the French poets --Baudelaire, Jouve, Char--and Jack Spicer--and many more with whom he was involved 'dialogically,' keeping them in mind and heart during his life, that is, the writing that was Aygi's life. A compassionate book masterfully and gracefully translated by Peter France." Philosopher Alain Badiou, in The Century, has written: "Regarding Aygi--whose only peer in the use of form, albeit coming from a completely different experience, is Celan--we can say that he comes under the heading of that which, within the century, takes stock in thought of the powers of language."