Description
This collection includes translations of 40 short verses and two longer pieces by Regina Derieva, all from 2002, when she settled into her new and last home — her last refuge — in a suburb of Stockholm. A couple of poems in this book were written in Swedish, her only attempt to use a newly-learned language. Images in Black, Continuous, with a few new additions, appeared in Swedish under the title Oavbrutet svarata bilder (2007) and was highly acclaimed by Swedish poets and critics.
Derieva’s work has been translated into several languages, including English, French, Swedish, Arabic, Italian, Chinese, Thai, Greek, and other languages. A compact disc with her readings in Russian of selected poems was issued in 1999. Derieva’s work has appeared in many Russian and Swedish magazines.
She translated poetry by Thomas Merton and contemporary American, Australian, British, Polish, and Swedish poets. Regina Derieva participated in a number of Swedish and international poetry festivals.
More details can be found in her Wikipedia page or on the dedicated to her website.
Regina Derieva (1949–2013) was a Russian poet, writer and translator who published around thirty books of poetry, essays, and prose. From July 1999 until her death she lived in Sweden. Her work has been translated into many languages, including Swedish, French, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Polish, and other languages. Regina Derieva’s books in English translation are Inland Sea and Other Poems, In Commemoration of Monuments, Instructions for Silence, Alien Matter, The Sum Total of Violations, Corinthian Copper and Earthly Lexicon. In 2003 she and Frederick Smock presented a joint reading of their poems in New York City.
Frederick Smock was Kentucky’s 2017/18 Poet Laureate. He is a Professor of English at Bellarmine University in Louisville where he received the 2005 Wyatt Faculty Award. The founding editor of the international literary journal The American Voice, he is the author of a dozen collections of poetry and literary essays including his The Bounteous World and On Poetry: Palm-of-the-Hand Essays. His work has appeared widely in US and international journals, and his prizes include the 2002 Henry Leadingham Poetry Prize, the 2003 Jim Wayne Miller Prize for Poetry, and the 2008 Kentucky Literary Award for Poetry.
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“What I like about Regina Derieva’s work is its directness and simplicity, by which I mean that it speaks directly to me and that it is lucid.”
— Daniel Weissbort
“Her veiling illness helps underline the poetic impersonality that Eliot argued makes a real poet and that is a key to her greatness. For while like all metaphysical poets, Derieva does share a portion of her psyche with us, she never does so as a confidant; but rather in a spirit closer to that of the mass. It is almost blasphemous to say that when we read her we consume a part of her psyche.”
— Fiona Sampson
“In Derieva’s poems soul depth is united with a supreme lack of sentimentality, solid awareness of tradition with an equally desperate sobriety.”
— Aris Fioretos
“Intimate variety. Regina Derieva is remarkable for the range of voices she deploys.”
— Les Murray