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Gennady Aygi’s longtime translator and friend Peter France has compiled this moving collection of tributes dedicated to some of the writers and artists who sustained him while living in the Moscow “underground.” Written in a quiet intensely expressive poetic style, Aygi’s inventive essays blend autobiography with literary criticism, social commentary, nature writing, and enlightening homage. He addresses such literary masters as Pasternak, Kafka, Mayakovsky, Celan, and Tomas Tranströmer, along with other writers from the Russian avant-garde and his native Chuvashia. Related poems by Aygi are also threaded between the essays. Reminiscent of Mandelstam’s elliptical travel musings and Kafka’s intensely spiritual jottings in his notebooks, Time of Gratitude glows with the love and humanity of a sacred vocation. “These leaves of paper," Aygi says, 'are swept up by the whirlwind of festivity; everything whirls—from Earth to Heaven—and perhaps the Universe too begins to swirl. Everything flows together in the rainbow colors and lights of the infinite world of Poetry.'

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"Nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature, winner of a number of international literary prizes, and translated into over twenty languages, Gennady Aygi is regarded as one of the most important Russian poets of the second half of the 20th century. He is a poet of the country and stands totally against the classical tradition of Russian poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky."—Poetry London Newsletter "Gennady Aygi is considered to be a major and original voice in contemporary poetry. Aygi’s poetry is a curious hybrid, influenced by Russian Symbolism and Futurism, European Modernism, and his Chuvash culture with its ancient pagan religion."—Journal of European Studies "Peter France’s scrupulous versions are faithful not simply to the often ambiguous sense of the originals, but also to the typographical minutiae … which spell out the exclamations, questionings, pauses, vulnerabilities and praises of this most remarkable poet."—Times Literary Supplement These "variations" on folkloric themes are born out of the Chuvash and Turkic motifs that Aygi grew up with, and which Aygi and France have collected in their work on Chuvash poetry. A Turkic language, Chuvash is spoken by about a million and a half people in and around Chuvashia—formerly an autonomous republic of the USSR—located 500 miles east of Moscow. Now in his 60s, Aygi continues to be celebrated as the Chuvash national poet, and as a major poet of the Russian language. 13. The birch’s rustle – like a whispered goodbye, and above it a solitary swift— like falling scissors. Gennady Aygi and Peter France have collaborated on numerous books, including Gennady Aygi: Selected Poems 1954-94 (translated by Peter France), and An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry (compiled by Gennady Aygi and translated by Peter France).

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Gennady Aygi's poems are as pleasurable for the uniqueness and clarity of their crafting as they are for the spirit they express. and -- the fields -- rise -- into the sky from each star -- there is -- a course to every other -- star Gennady Aygi (1934--2006) is regarded as the Chuvash national poet. Relatively unpublished until the 1980s in the Soviet Union, he has been celebrated abroad, nominated for the Nobel Prize on multiple occasions, and translated into more than twenty languages. Sarah Valentine is a poet and scholar who teaches at the University of California Riverside. This is her first book of translations.

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Lifelong Aygi translator and friend Peter France wrote in The Guardian: “Aygi wrote from a deep awareness of the losses and destructions of the 20th century.” Field-Russia is a book of poems arranged shortly before Aygi’s death, which in his view occupied a central place in his work. The collection opens with an informal conversation about poetry, and is followed by a series of little lyric “books”—Field-Russia, Time of the Ravines, and Final Departure—that form a part of Aygi’s “life-book.” Like Ahkmatova and Celan before him, Aygi has left us with these most necessary words to dwell in—a quiet, spiritual poetry in a time of uprootedness and despair.

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A remarkable poetic account of a man and his daughter. Though relatively unpublished in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s, Gennady Aygi's work has been translated into some twenty languages, and has received major acclaim through many parts of the world. Child-and-Rose is a unique collection of poems and prose chosen and arranged by the author and translator. Taking as its central themes childhood, sleep, and silence in relation to poetic creation, the book is divided into five sections"Veronica's Book," "Sleep-and-Poetry," "Before and After the Book," "Silvia's World," and "Poetry-as-Silence"all written between 1972 and 2002. In this collection, each poem is a carefully crafted space of language that surfaces from the heart of a poetic consciousness at "the limits of intelligibility," as the translator notes. Images of Aygi's Chuvash homelandbirches, oaks, snow, roses, fieldsmix with a disrupted syntax, astonishing turns, gaps, and suspensions that all speak to a quiet stillness of being.

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