Poetry Book Society Translation Choice
Shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021
War of the Beasts and the Animals is Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s first full English-language collection. It includes her recent long poems of conflict "Spolia" and "War of the Beasts and Animals", written during the Donbas conflict, as well as a third long poem "The Body Returns", commissioned by Hay International Festival in 2018 to commemorate the Centenary of the First World War. In all three long poems Stepanova’s assured and experimental use of form, her modernist appropriation of poetic texts from around the world and her constant consideration of the way that culture, memory and contemporary life are interwoven make her work both pleasurable and deeply necessary.
This collection also includes two sequences of poems from her 2015 collection Kireevsky: sequences of ‘weird’ ballads and songs, subtly changed folk and popular songs and poems which combine historical lyricism and a contemporary understanding of the effects of conflict and trauma. Stepanova uses the ready forms of ballads and songs, but alters them, so they almost appear to be refracted in moonlit water. The forms seem recognisable, but the words are oddly fragmented and suggestive, they weave together well-known refrains of songs, apparently familiar images, subtle half-nods to films and music.
Translated by Sasha Dugdale.
Paperback