Earthly Lexicon
Selected Poems and Prose
(PREORDER)  

by Regina Derieva

Earthly Lexicon
Selected Poems and Prose

by Regina Derieva

Preorder Paperback
Publication Date: Fall 2019
158 Pages
ISBN13: 978-1-934851-73-9 
USD $17.00 + Shipping

About the Author, Regina Derieva

"The Russian poet Regina Derieva was born in Odessa on the Black Sea, and enjoyed the shifting rhythms of the sea: 'Water is the ideal apparel. However many times you get into it, it’s the same'. Her passion for water was shared by her epistolary friend, Joseph Brodsky, who grew up alongside St. Petersburg’s canals and spent as much time as he could in Venice, where he is buried on the cemetery island of San Michele. Derieva, whom Brodsky called 'a great poet', viewed a very different landscape, however: from the age of sixteen she lived obscurely in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, 'perhaps the most dismal corner of the former Soviet Union – once the centre of a vast prison camp universe, later just a gloomy industrial city', according to the distinguished Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova. For him, Derieva’s precise, epigrammatic poems limn 'the concentration camp zone, where space is turned into emptiness, and time turned into disappearance'." (The Times Literary Supplement) Then followed nine fruitful years in Palestine and fourteen (not less productive) in Sweden, alternating with trips to various places around the globe. Between 2002 and 2007 Regina visited the USA often; now, in the present book, her cycle of poems, “Northeast States”, is made available in its entirety.

Regina Derieva, who died in Stockholm in 2013, was not only a poet, but a prose writer, translator, musician and enthusiastic amateur conchologist. This third American collection of her poems also contains essays, prose pieces and the unfinished "The Normal Chaos of Things". ”

Reviews

“” "The importance of Derieva’s poetry lies in this sense of how worlds permeate each other, how the world inside and the world outside harmonize or struggle against each other with little distinction between the state of politics and culture and the state of the soul." — Pembroke Magazine

"...A remarkably, if often disagreeably, perspicacious poet." — Translation and Literature

"Derieva delights in contradictions and is a master of the epigram. 'Maxims and Paradoxes on the Accidental Sheets' begins: "all my life / I sought / an angel. / And he appeared / in order to say: / 'I am no angel!'". Throughout it all she wears her heart on her sleeve – and perhaps this makes her unfashionable among contemporary poets; but hers is a brave and eminently readable voice." — Poetry Review  

Praise for Previous Work

“”"Science teaches that eighty percent of the universe consists of dark matter, so called. Regina Derieva learned this same fact in a very hard school. She does not consent to it, though. She knows that the hurt truth in us points to a dimension where, for example, victory is cleansed of battle. Her strict, economical poems never waver from that orientation." — Les Murray

"Regina Derieva's best poems are simultaneously elusive and immediate, striking and understated, personal and distanced. Few poets attempt such transformation in so few words." — Tim Liardet

"With wit and courage, her poetry lives on." — Annie Finch

"I love her poems, serious and tender, hers was the metaphysical voice that endears, allows kindness. I love the the humor and fierce clarity of her prose pieces, those of hers that drop musical notes all over the floor, and then kneel to gather them like feathers. We have lost a poet so unmistakably beautiful, a poet whose attentiveness to the world was a prayer. May her works find many readers." — Ilya Kaminsky