here is a big heavy new sub, folks, on the lines of my "Eng Lit" poems. I'd
like to know if your views on its problems are the same as mine. The lines
are very long so I hope they dont split too confusingly. They  are long
lined quatrains that end-rhyme aa,bb.

After reading Pasternak.

Totality a rink of fear, snowed in by purity,
Yuri wrote with love's ink, through years of insecurity,
his world filled with glowing visions, clamorously lilting views,
wolvine familiar vistas, flowing elisions, glamorous hopes, ability to
choose.

Chosen, a country of the brave and willing who had forgotten the ropes of
their fate
when politics caved in, gave way to killing. Utterly hard to love or hate
or to crystallise goodness, or hunt creation  out of the charred, wrecked
chance
life gave: to distil from the burnt blaze of a situation the perfect
response.

A country Nabokov and Brodsky differed from, it was your dove
flying to stars of grace. MacDiarmid's mentor Lermontov
and Pushkin who so splendidly provoked more fearsome than Byronic
forces to stem him, in his tracks revoked. Tolstoy, that old beatnik,

spilled tales across those wide wild wastes, between long rivers sneaking
uncharted and unbridged:  we heard the pace and roar of your speaking.
You penned down laborious pages, in languages we take small part in
nor bother slaving with, while, we gather, you appreciated Greek and Latin.

It was too much to ask of us to listen beyond light-programmes
we could not help attend, while courts glistened, luring you to pogroms
from servitude to servitude  of such  dimension we in Europe hardly dared
to entertain, until our hordes were bogged in trenchment mud, not spared.

How distant seemed your literary and political crossroads.
Women heaved sickles, tackled boars and bricks and heavy loads
while ours faltered and fainted, ribbon-goaded brothers awkard and inept.
A new age carelesly painted unimagnable concepts.

Boris, how was your fate unravelled? It is late and I am no Russky or
communist  or even travelled. It is another century, another war
and I so non-specific, neither a pucker poet nor a novelist
nor worker, nor retired, prolific, aristo nor poor; an anti-genderist,

for generalities are all I ask in general. Still, I shout in fright,
I can respond to bookish tasks, these feats that must diminish under distant
light
where serfs, dearth, duels, haunt gigantic steppes beyond
our flaunted ignorance. What would we expect of antique words like >fond<,

<warmth<, >fire< or >hope<? A poem that carries fire and hope I hope yet
frees
my heart, a heart still marching with earlier hearts like those your
fantasies
connect with. In our language Hardy's characters may be like them.
As though we now consumed among our worldly stratagem

antidotes to the searing senses, snows and forest leaves
a scrap of foraged seed the wocked cuckoo dispenses, rotten harvest sheaves.
Sure, laughing swallow, you may flee the river-beds and bilberry
in tundra, your secret to follow, flight-led, unencumbered, fortune's
poetry.

c Sally Evans