cover image Apollo in the Snow: Selected Poems 1960-1987

Apollo in the Snow: Selected Poems 1960-1987

Aleksandr Kushner. Farrar Straus Giroux, $19.95 (112pp) ISBN 978-0-374-10549-5

A stoic witness to the enormities of history and day-to-day survival, Russian lyric poet Kushner writes with the pulsing immediacy of Boris Pasternak and the self-contained composure of Anna Akhmatova. Even up in heaven, suspects this product of icy Leningrad, ``we will find winter . . . all sounds canceled, stilled by total peace.'' With jolting symbolism, he rages at poet Osip Mandelstam's disappearance in a labor camp (``Mozart's skull, from between two columns of the news, calmly eyed us''). Kushner, born in 1936, is a deeply cultured yet down-to-earth poet who puts a contemporary spin on classical rhymes and meters. His achingly poignant lyrics give palpable form to love's wrenching separations, the omnipresence of death, the elusive search for a pattern in our lives. (Jan.)