Times for some poetry to feature again on the Ramblings! I’ve enjoyed a bit of a resurgence of my reading of verse over recent months, and I’m determined to keep this up – even if, as in today’s case, it’s once again a very slim collection. They certainly seem to have been a good way to get back into poetry reading, as those large complete volumes can be so intimidating… Today’s title is a relatively recent arrival and, as usual, I can’t recall how I came across it. However, it was a welcome addition to my poetry shelves – the title is “Red Cats”, translated by Anselm Hollo, and it’s an old and fragile City Lights Pocket Poets book. I have a number of those in my library, mainly in the form of Allan Ginsberg books, but this particular title is an anthology of translations from the Russian, and it made fascinating reading.

I should state straight away that I’m going to count this book for our #1962Club reads as the English translations are stated in the front of the book to be copyright that year. The verses it contains are from a range of Russian poets, some of whom I was familiar and some of who were new to me. The names are Yevgeni Yevtushenko, Semyon Kirsanov and Andrei Voznesensky. Yevtushenko was, of course, becoming a more widely known name globally at the time, and as the blurb on the back of the book makes clear, the poets were making the most of the thaw in relations between east and west at the time. I’ll share an image of the back of the chapbook so you can see what that blurb says!

But let’s put the rhetoric aside and look at the poems. What struck me initially was the modernity of the verse and how so much of it was still relevant. For example, Yevtushenko’s Uriah Heep – a London Poem rails about the title character ‘cheering the neo-fascists’ and ‘writing weird articles in the Daily Mail’ so it rather seems that not much has changed there…

Kirsanov’s poem Mayakovsky Has Gone is a lovely piece, capturing the essense of Mayakovsky and his writing in its lines. Yevtushenko’s short work From the Portrait of a “Nihilist” reflects the eternal clash of generations which will probably never change, whatever time or culture you live in. And Kirsanov cuts through to the heart of things (literally!) with his poem The New Heart, where he reflects of the need to love and understand each other, but also to know who can be approached and who avoided – always a knotty problem under totalitarian regimes.

A heart
for the future: to feel
and love with. A heart
to understand men with:

The poems in “Red Cats” are often very representative of their times, yet somehow transcend them – which is I suppose a sign of good poetry. I found them very immediate, very emotionally resonant and very human; the kind of poetry I like and that I often return to. I’m not sure at what point in 1962 this book was published (although the poems themselves are mostly dated 1960 and 1961); however, October of that year of course saw the Cuban Missile Crisis and things going pear-shaped between east and west again. Maybe “Red Cats” was a glimmer of hope which looked for reconciliation between both sides; however, it stands now as a collection of some marvellous poets, and although I’ve previously read Yevtushenko, I’m not sure the Kirsanov or Voznesensky have crossed my path before. On the basis of their work here, though, I definitely want to read more of them! 😀