Life as gift
A strong statement by a man whose life was taken from him in the harshest circumstances, and who lived at...
Where every word starts with ‘a’
I love Mandelstam's poetic summary of place, here the city of Sukhum, where he says every word starts with...
Pink of old roses
Musty pink makes me think of an old breed of faded rose, or a soft-worn damask, or one of the...
Expressing allegiance
Mandelstam seems to have seen something timeless in the curve of a horse’s neck in Armenia, and discerned a proud...
The secret cupboard of the mountain sun
Wishing you a climate where the light trades in the gold currency of cognac. Not the first mention I have...
A timeless calm
I loved this one. Something about Tatar children bathing horses in Alushta that conveys a secure, happy world and an...
Thick-fingered roads
A chunky junction? Wide roads converging on a roundabout, an original description of a transport node.
Source: Osip Mandelstam,...
Poetry as recall
Slowly I’m building a collection of quotations defining poetry. With a few more in the bag, we can lay them...
Take a twenty-verst stroll
A verst is an old Russian measurement for distance, a few steps more than a kilometre. So I wish you...
Serenade in fur coat
Had to read this one a couple of times – it’s imaginative and convoluted. First the image of ‘the body...
White-toothed commissars
Perhaps alluding to a world in which commissars, having some status in the pecking order, probably had a better chance...
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