из Стихотворения Книга 5

Mikhail Eremin has lived in St. Petersburg since before WWII, writing and publishing very sparsely for over a half-century in a peculiar kind of highly respected anonymity, his work having the reputation of being the most hermetically “difficult” in all of Russian poetry. His response: “But poets are meaning-makers.” He was awarded the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize in 1998 and, in the fall of 2014, the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship residency at the American Academy in Rome. His oeuvre, consisting entirely of eight-line “free verse,” has been issued by Pushkinskii Fond in five volumes (so far), each one modestly titled Poems. When asked why octaves, he responded: “They structure themselves precisely so.” Regarding the free verse label: “In fact, these are absolutely iambs, [the stress] shifting between the second and fourth paeon.” That is, there is a strong patterning of duration and sound, as for each poem as a whole so for each line (there is even rhyme). Regarding his early influences: “Pasternak and the Oberiu [Russian Absurdists].”

Primary among Eremin’s recurrent thematic touchstones—the Bible, classical mythology, art, architecture, Russian folklore—is the natural world. It is where the spirit inheres; he is a metaphysical poet. It seems to me that the crux of Eremin’s ongoing conversation with the world offers us a panentheistic conception of nature as the locus of divine immanence in creation. The critic Ilya Kukulin has written that Eremin’s poems give “metaphorical expression to the transformation of the soul.” In this respect, he connects Eremin to Osip Mandelstam, another practitioner of the eight-line verse, finding a common source in Mandelstam’s writings on Dante’s “search for the spiritual foundations of the world.” Kukulin concludes that these external transformations have an invisible counterpart in the internal “soul work, the discovery of one’s own ‘I’—for the apprehension of all these treasures. Each time, this apprehension may only be provisional and so it requires a choice . . . Eremin’s art offers one possibility for how such poetry may endure in the post-modern era . . . Even with all its philosophic qualities, it remains a private and faith-filled lyric.”