Letters from Aldenderry (Salt Modern Poets) [Paperback]

The electricity of Nikolayev’s poetic intelligence is such that, although with the distinctive mark of poetry that was written to please nobody but himself, everywhere his poetry seems to speak right out to the reader. (Ben Mazer Jacket )

Philip Nikolayev’s new collection is magnificent. His loyal readers will delight, once again, in his ability to tease and to move at the same time. Like Nabokov, he opens up English to its own alienation—he finds rhymes and half-rhymes, puns and lexical jokes, odd-sounding adverbs and adjectives, where native speakers would miss them. But he is much more than merely ludic. He also quests: he has a mobile, philosophical mind, and relentlessly uses poetry to explore what he calls “our prism of comprehension.” There are splendid poems here, as rich and robust and lyrical as anything being written in America today. (James Wood )

Poetry has no precedent for the voice in Letters from Aldenderry. Colloquial and demotic, it takes pride and pleasure in the sound of American, but it is emphatically “from elsewhere” in its joyful symmetries. What astounds is the multiplicity of Nikolayev’s registers and his command of perfect verbal pitch. This is cosmopolitan one-man theater at its best. Life is all there, its whole nine yards from birth to shock to recovery, from thoughtful conversation and intimacies of the soul to standup guffaws and punning provocation. Filled with an organic fusion of extremes, with healthy experimentation and a history of poetic forms that looms behind every line, this book is an apotheosis of freedom that shuts the gaping gulf between lyric and avant-garde. The poems are about what has been lost and found and is worth keeping: creative solitude, empathy, love, pain and laughter, the poetic experience itself. Words do not swallow the reader in an avalanche of consciousness, they flow to a varied musical rhythm and make sense. The overall impression is integral and wholesome. The work succeeds at modeling a persuasive modern hero—a far-flung, uprooted émigré intellectual who makes his home in diverse languages and cultures and stares at the world through a unique pair of eyes. This type is among the most interesting in current literature, fraught as it is with multiple biography, dialectics, contradictions. A poet can cultivate compassion to the point of sheer self-transformation. Nikolayev is crazy in the best possible sense of the word.

Born in Moscow in 1966 and raised in Russia and Moldova, Philip Nikolayev grew up equally fluent in English and Russian. On relocating to the US in 1990 to attend Harvard he has written primarily in English. His poetry is published internationally. Nikolayev’s previous collections include Monkey Time, winner of the 2001 Verse Prize. He lives in Boston and co-edits Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics.

Eternal City
For Samuel Gareginyan

He who says that in art
one finds not the object
but its myth, himself stands
monastically thin
and looks like his own
self-portrait, the same eye
staring out at you,
marking your silhouette
against the wall or posture at table
with its wild precision.
He needs so few things that he got rid
of the chairs in his studio for want of space
and stands for hours as he finishes
Dionysus’ hairy thigh
or the nymph’s coy hand,
still on the hefty shoulder.
When out of his window
in war-torn Armenia
he gazed at the ruins
of Erevan’s tall gardens
reduced to firewood,
he understood that to revive a place
one must by an effort of the soul
rebuild it from scratch, so he painted
his Eternal City
over three years in several apartments,
first there then here, and I
am now bound to roam it forever,
a myth impossible to exit.
When he went to real Rome,
he didn’t like it,
although he did shudder
at the sight of aesthetic treasures
long photographed by his heart
to the obscurest detail.
He says there was too much food
and it was too good,
a distraction for the mind,
which must be hungry.
A feast once in a while is OK,
but Europe doesn’t need any
more beauty: now an artist can live
only in America.