Holy Winter 20/21 by Maria Stepanova, trans. by Sasha Dugdale
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY TRANSLATION CHOICE SPRING 2024 Kae Tempest and its range of themes

and its range of themes are all to be found too in Burgess's poetry

and their writing has an elegiac quality

A ‘state of the nation’ address from a basement bunker in lockdown Brighton

Human relations are fleeting and vulnerable

Ghostly glitches

Holy Winter 20/21 by Maria Stepanova, trans. by Sasha Dugdale<br><b>POETRY BOOK SOCIETY TRANSLATION CHOICE SPRING 2024</b> Kae Tempest and its range of themesThe outbreak of Covid 19 cut short Maria Stepanova's stay in Cambridge. Back in Russia, she spent the ensuing months in a state of torpor the world had withdrawn from her, time had "gone numb". When she awoke from this state, she began to read Ovid, and the shock of the pandemic dissolved into the voices and metaphors of an epochal experience. Her book length poem Holy Winter 20 21, written in a frenzy of poetic inspiration, speaks of winter and war,