reviews

The latest trends in understanding poetry as engaged art, the displacement of aesthetics not only by politics but by ethics, and the work aimed at bringing the lyrical subject as close as possible to the recipient - while acknowledging the inevitable boundary between them - all that constitutes the nerve of a significant part of innovative contemporary poetry was predicted in due time by the poetics of Alexander Manichenko, one of the most original and simultaneously unread poets of his generation.

One would like to be a person who speaks this way. Not because the speech is alluring, but because it is forthright. Here, poetry is a way to speak about the essential while remaining convincing. The reader’s joy lies in knowing that there is order in the world and that it can be created from a simple need for it: "and now with every right I am part / of that power able to bestow authority."

Manichenko is a poet of awkwardness. Minimal declaration, speech that approaches obliquely, avoidance of trauma issues, extreme caution in addressing bodily concreteness (“an elephant named sex” as a symbol of something inappropriate not only in the text but in life) form the basis of Manichenko’s poetics — and this manner refers us, rather, to the poetry of the turn of the century.

Critics also note the free adaptation by the Ural poet Alexander Manichenko, who translated Frost "not so much into the Russian language, but into the language of post-conceptualism."