What a perceptive and moving conclusion to @nadyawilliams81.bsky.social’s new review of Andrey Kurkov’s Kyiv Mysteries in @plough.bosky.social… Thank you! @quercusbooks.bsky.social @harpercollins.bsky.social www.plough.com/articles/and...

Readers, I implore you, listen to Eric Bies and get yourselves to @pauldrybooks.bsky.social! Voloshin awaits!

To be read at all, much less so appreciatively, is a great privilege… Thank you again, @ocregister.bsky.social!

Missing LA this morning, I posted a brief poem by a fellow Odesa-born émigré, Viktor Rayzman (b. 1934), with whom I must have ridden this very bus route at least once…

Linger over that perfect line break in the closing couplet of this poem, or over the rhymes of the second in the link, and you will come to appreciate just how hard this soi-disant “minor poet” has fought to “to be good in his own way.” I love these translations!

Instructive story about holding personal subjects at a slight distance in poems. Thomas Hardy wrote this after his cat’s death. Florence, his young love, objected to the line calling the cat the “only friend.” H. assured her that the man was not him, just one in his situation.

I’m in this week’s @thetls.bsky.social, reviewing Maxim Tarnawsky’s translation of a Ukrainian classic, Valerian Pidmohylnyi’s THE CITY (1928), which is a hit in wartime Kyiv—and also offering a little background on the “Executed Renaissance” and Russia’s long war against Ukrainian culture.

Charles Martin, one of my favorite poets, shares a story about his mother’s brush with history. For the other poem, by @azforeman, click through: nimrodjournal.substack.com/p/history-ad...

One of these two devastating lyrics—this one by Arthur Solway.

Don’t take it from Andrey Kurkov and me, take it from @newyorker.com: “Kolechko is a kind of anti-Poirot … In Kurkov's hands, his efforts offer both serious meditations and page-turning diversion.” @quercusbooks.bsky.social @harpercollins.bsky.social

It would be silly to hope for this odd little book to become a runaway bestseller. If it reaches a handful of people and brings them some measure of pleasure, I would be more than satisfied. When I see a reader’s response like the one I just spotted on Goodreads, I rejoice.

I came to Hollywood Forever to pay my respects to Alexander Voloshin, and to tell him—or so I would like to believe—that his work, so long neglected, now has a chance to bring a few sighs and smiles to readers in the language of the country where he rests.

Charles Gullans (1929-93)—student of Yvor Winters, mentor to Timothy Steele—spent most of his career at UCLA and wrote with great dignity and passion about the loneliness he experienced and witnessed in Los Angeles as a gay bachelor. Something of Cavafy in this poem.

A poem for my grandmother and Lucille Ball, from the June issue of Australian Book Review—with enormous gratitude to the dazzling Felicity Plunkett and the other editors.

I never miss a library sale in Tulsa. The last visit netted a beautiful edition of the works of the tragically short-lived Muscogee (Creek) poet Alexander Posey (1873-1908). His readings in Plutarch gave him the right perspective on the question of “great men” and their empires.

A brief tribute to my late friend Oscar Mandel (1926-2026). borisdralyuk.substack.com/p/home-goes-...

My friend Oscar Mandel, who was born in Belgium in 1926, escaped the Nazis in 1940, and taught literature for decades at Cal Tech, died two days ago—just three months shy of his 100th. He was a great thinker, a great stylist, a great wit. The embodiment of culture. His lullaby:

Thank you, Molly Odintz of @crimereads.bsky.social for giving Andrey Kurkov’s THE LOST SOLDIERS a spot in your roundup of international must-reads! “An author who has long understood the intersection of suffering and absurdity.” @harpercollins.bsky.social @quercusbooks.bsky.social

Grateful and somewhat ashamed to have so slight a poem in a firecracker of an anthology, AS OF FIRE, from Bainbridge Island Press: bainbridgeisland.press/products/as-...

A killer recommendation from @galbeckerman.bsky.social for @theatlantic.com Summer Reads special—the first of Andrey Kurkov’s Kyiv Mysteries. Samson Kolechko just unraveled his third case for @harpercollins.bsky.social and @quercusbooks.bsky.social, so you had better catch up!

“…For there were times / when we’d head south, to warmer climes— / Sorrento, Monte Carlo, Nice, / Capri… We’d follow our caprice…” I brought Alexander Voloshin back to one of his old haunts, Nice, which is once again home to scores of Ukrainian refugees and Russian émigrés…

Last week I left my bag in a black cab. Assumed it was lost forever. Moments before I passed through security at Heathrow, the cabby—who’d identified me by my books—contacted me on Twitter. An hour later, bag in hand, I was ready to fly. He asked for a poem. Here you are, Gary Vidgeon!

Hugely uplifted by Isabel Jacobs’s lovely review of Alexander Voloshin’s SIDETRACKED in the vital print-only TRANSLATOR mag! “[C]omes alive in Dralyuk’s inventive and often hilarious translation. … [D]epicts Hollywood between the wars as a place of hustle, rather than glamour.”

Whenever I think my punning has gone too far, I think of Les Murray, whose poems I am now rereading for comfort. Who would want to see the world only as a “groan person”? “… punning moves toward music.”

Some thoughts on nostalgia in POETRY magazine, with a few lines from EA Robinson, Frost, Tsvetaeva, and Donald Justice. Eternal gratitude to the kind and brilliant @jeremylybarger.bsky.social www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

I never thought I’d write a WWI poem, but an encounter with a neglected monument on Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California inspired this. Thank you, John Hennessy and @commonmag.bsky.social.

In FIRST THINGS, John Wilson recalls stories his grandmother told him of her missionary work in Shanghai as he reads Alexander Voloshin’s SIDETRACKED, about which he has some very nice things to say! @pauldrybooks.bsky.social firstthings.com/a-tragi-comi...

My great thanks to the editors of @newversereview.bsky.social for housing my translation of Julia Nemirovskaya’s poem about the inner spirit—the zest, the spark—that keeps the abyss at bay.

Happy publication day to the swarthy bather on the right, Alexander Voloshin, who has waited a long time for his moment in the sun… www.pauldrybooks.com/products/sid... @pauldrybooks.bsky.social

My April trio.