Life as gift
A strong statement by a man whose life was taken from him in the harshest circumstances, and who lived at...
Poetry as plough
Elsewhere Mandelstam connects poetry to recall. Here it is a time-turning plough, bringing the deepest layers of time to the...
Milky metaphors
Milky quietude sounds like something to be welcomed, whereas a curdling whey of silence is to be escaped. I like...
A coral coinage
What an exuberant description of wild strawberries! A coral coinage with the berries singing not only in batches, but in...
A quotation is a cicada
Having built this ever expanding website partly as a way to share the thousands of quotations captured over decades of...
Time and poets
This summary of where Mandelstam places the poet versus the ‘man of letters’ on the time spectrum intrigues me. Yes,...
Swift as a telegram
This simile for swiftness drawing on an age in which telegram were one of the fastest forms of communication. Also...
Serenade in fur coat
Had to read this one a couple of times – it’s imaginative and convoluted. First the image of ‘the body...
From pantheon to palate
A piled up commentary of poets on poets: Heaney on Mandelstam on Dante. Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), who died in uncertain...
White-toothed commissars
Perhaps alluding to a world in which commissars, having some status in the pecking order, probably had a better chance...
Jangling the keys of your language
A lovely way to signal a pride and enjoyment of one’s language, a linguistic version of jangling your Ferrari keys...
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...
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