"Gennady Aygi, a potent underground presence for three decades, is now accorded leading status in Russia and many Eastern and Western European countries. Born in the Chuvash Autonomous Republic, he was encouraged by Pasternak to write in Russian in the late 1950s, since when he has lived and worked, often precariously, in Moscow.". ""Like Hopkins with English," Edwin Morgan has written, "Aygi forces the Russian language to do things it has never done before." The language of his free verse is disjunctive, subconscious, antirational. His poetry is at the confluence of avant-garde European modernism and the traditional culture of his near-Asiatic homeland. His themes - stillness, communion between human and non-human worlds, memory, birth, sleep - provide room for deeply felt responses to both private and public events.". "This first substantial presentation of Aygi's poetry to the English-speaking world, with original texts and facing translations, and the translator's critical introduction, end notes and close readings of three poems, draws on each of the mature poem-sequences."--BOOK JACKET.