What We Saw From This Mountain

New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017. New Book. Paperback. 128 pp.

Translated by Julia Trubikhina-Kunina, Betsy Hulick, Gerald Janecek.

This is the first English-language collection of poetry by contemporary Russian poet, essayist, and prose writer Vladimir Aristov, a satellite figure of the Metarealist literary movement of the 1980s-90s. While the late Alexei Parshchikov and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko are somewhat better known to US readers, Aristov, who was their close friend, exemplifies both poets' trajectories-his work explores metaphor-centered narrative poetry while assimilating American Language poetry and European postmodern theory. Aristov's poetics is characterized by a philosophical thoughtfulness made more profound by his life-long work as a scientist, and by striking images that evoke the late poetry of Osip Mandelstam.

Vladimir Aristov (b. 1950, Moscow) is a poet and physicist. Since his first publications in the late 1980s, Aristov has authored seven books of poetry, a novel, numerous articles and essays, and a play about the Russian philosopher Gustav Shpet (killed by Stalin in the 1930s). Associated with the Metarealist movement, Aristov's poetry and essays have been published widely in Russian literary magazines (Nezavisimaia gazeta, Arion, Vozdukh, NLO, etc.) He is a recipient of the Alexei Kruchenykh Prize (1993) and the Andrei Bely Independent Literary Prize (2008), and his work was included in two US anthologies of post-modern Russian poetry, The Third Wave and Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry. He has translated George Seferis and Michael Palmer into Russian and is currently working on a collection of essays entitled Idem-Forma.

"At last available in English, Vladimir Aristov's thought-provoking poetry will give many pleasures to its new readers. Aristov layers the complex metaphors associated with the poetry of Metarealism with a strangely beautiful music. He moves carefully, attentively through spaces both built and densely overgrown, and he is ever a keen listener: his poems create worlds that are saturated with language and sounds, even as they glisten in visual unreality and tactile truth."
Stephanie Sandler

"Vladimir Aristov is a brilliant and audacious poet of that generation, known as the Third Wave, who helped to reinvigorate Russian poetry and critical thought after the Stalinist years. Challenging the dull orthodoxies of conventional realism, he envisions a poetic world of imaginative leaps and metamorphic flows, of limits tested and overcome. The goal, in Blake's words: to cleanse the doors of perception and see the world anew."
Michael Palmer.