Occasional and Joke Poems

Parallel to his more famous poems about the buildings of St. Petersburg, the shores of the Black Sea, and the streets of Voronezh, Mandelstam wrote many brief, spontaneous poems about his friends, enemies and everyday occurrences over his entire writing life. Though his poetic, political and personal trajectory was to be a lonely one, he in fact had a convivial and gregarious personality, of which these poems are a product. This volume collects them in English for the first time, with an introduction and notes for context. It provides a fresh perspective on this poet whose sense of the past, the present and the future seems second to none. Praise for Concert at a Railway Station :"To my mind this is the best Mandelstam 'selected' yet and belongs on the bookshelves of everyone with an interest in 20th-Century Russian verse."-Ross Cogan, Poetry Wales"Alistair Noon's translations of Mandelstam are an important contribution to the study and appreciation of this vital writer."-Anton Romanenko, B O D Y"Noon daringly replicates Mandelstam's formal stanzas, using slant rhymes with a zingy freshness of diction that stops the poems from ever sounding like translationese."-Henry King, Glasgow Review of Books