Resistance

Brussels-born Serge (1890-1947), novelist ( Conquered City ) and poet, lived for a time in Russia, where he translated Russian writers into his native French and became a committed Marxist. The poems in this slender volume vividly record his years spent fighting in the Russian Revolution before Serge was exiled in 1933 to central Asia. As shown here, the poet's birthright offered him a unique perspective, as in his ability to view Russian peasants as ``other'' (``Then there's the fisherman in the pond / poorer than the poor man in Puvis' gray landscape''), while seeing his fellow revolutionaries as ``we'' (``Row, Vassili, row. Let's pull together / we are brothers / in defeat and hard times''). And Serge's biting irony, unlike that found in his Russian contemporaries, conceals an unfailing hope and sensitivity--he does not simply mourn the death of a friend, but records the look and feel of the unbreathing body with a lover's gentleness. Such pk lyricism carries these poems far past their topical subjects. (Nov.)