Tribute to Regina Derieva 1949-2013

Posted by Angela Jarman, 19th December 2013

On Friday 13 December 2013, we received the sad news of Regina Derieva's death from her husband Alexander. Although we had the good fortune to publish her book The Sum Total of Violations, a substantial volume of her more recent poetry selected and translated by the late Daniel Weissbort, we never had the opportunity of meeting her in the flesh. But Daniel's highly personal selection of her work created such a distinctive voice for Regina in English that we, as her publishers in the UK, and also those who read this book, felt that we knew her and that our lives had been enriched by her poetry. She will be greatly missed.

Please share your own memories and tributes in the comments section below.

Comments

On 10 Oct 2014 Ilya Kaminsky said:

I love her poems, serious and tender, hers was the metaphysical voice that endears, allows kindness. I love the the humor and fierce clarity of her prose pieces, those of hers that drop musical notes all over the floor, and then kneel to gather them like feathers. We have lost a poet so unmistakably beautiful, a poet whose attentiveness to the world was a prayer. May her works find many readers.
-Ilya Kaminsky

On 21 Jan 2014 Craig Czury said:

Beautifully Old Among The Apple Trees
(for Regina)

one of us is dead by now
I’m sitting on a green hand-painted bench
composting wood smoke and clipped grass in the whining white night of my harmonica
it’s the spring birds that wake us widest
hearing the first lone click no matter how defined
you can’t blame the brightest for leaving or shimmering underneath
waking the others into interchangeable language of

this is the horizon
it lingers deeper than peripheral

— Craig Czury,
Pushkin, Russia

On 21 Jan 2014 Antoni Albalat Salanova said:

El poeta es siempre un ser enjaulado no sólo por la realidad sino, paradoja, por su necesidad vital de cantar: es prisionero de sí mismo, de su voz interior, de su vivencia más profunda que necesita cantar siempre: es un Sísifo del pensamiento y de la comunicación de los temas más graves, más medulares. Esa voz, en Regina, llegó a resonar incluso con aspereza: con fuerza y desesperación, con desgarro de martirologio. Por eso lo grita, porque llega a ser desgarro y aullido. El poeta también aúlla: nos lo enseñó Allen Ginsberg y Regina no sólo nos lo recordó, sino que aulló (tal vez no sólo por ella, sino, quiero pensar, que por todos nosotros y, en especial, por toda la gente que aún en 2013 necesita aullar y no puede). Su poesía, su aullido perenne es un acto de expiación ecuménica. El dolor de Regina lleva tatuado en la piel de sus palimpsestos el dolor de tantos y tantos seres humanos que sufren amordazados en cualquier lugar del planeta. Derieva aúlla sin concesiones a la poesía de verso amable, de palabras hermosas, sin dejarse arrastrar por el canto fácil de las sirenas del verso afectado por la estética y vacío de contenido existencial.

On 11 Jan 2014 Yeow Kai Chai said:

singapore epitaph

i.m. regina derieva

stare into
lens hair in
breeze grey with

streaks forearm
leaning on
stump gnawed by

wind salt sun
creeps behind
sea tugboat

off this isle
all this while
alive

On 9 Jan 2014 Hsien Min Toh said:

i.m. Regina Derieva

Yesterday differs from today
insofar as there has been a loss
of a voice with much to say
and much to be said about.

On 5 Jan 2014 Arcady Kotler said:

Regina poetic language combine the greatest imaginative accuracy with the most elaborate and sensible organization

On 5 Jan 2014 Paddy Bushe said:

I met Regina Derieva at a festival in Singapore in 2007. I was impressed by her integrity and sincerity at both the personal and the poetic levels. It is these qualities that will ensure her work lives on.

Woman and Winter Wind
i.m. Regina Derieva

The woman lay among the soft mounds
At the very top of the hill, at one
With the buffeting wind that combed
The airy moor-grass across her face.

All the hillside streamed with it, and she
Flowed with it too, and danced each time
A withered blade broke free and whirled
And scribed its ecstasy into the air.

O never, she thought, was woman
So safely held, as the wind swept up
And over the hill, pouring out through
A rocky gap into the winter sky.

Prelude, she whispered, this grassy wind
Breaking through that wild gap is a prelude.

On 3 Jan 2014 Lars Palm said:

i want to remember Regina Derieva who passed away on december 11. i met her briefly twice, 2005 in malmö & 2007 in stockholm. on both occasions for international poetry festivals. & speaking of her poetry i enjoyed it a great deal although we lived in different literary traditions. all i can add is a brief poem

(the gun)

i. m Regina Derieva

central london pub

pint of bitter winter

call from alexander in stockholm

you have retired

bitter winter indeed

at least no snow for now

On 1 Jan 2014 Richard J. Reisner said:

Beyond
For Regina

There are words but not enough
For the living
words are the eye of struggle
For those beyond
they are but mumblings
of the once blind
who can see
but know not to speak

On 1 Jan 2014 William Doreski said:

While I didn't know Regina personally, I knew her work and admired her vivid and adventurous voice. The world needs poetry like hers, and she wrote for the entire planet. Everyone loses when a fine poet has gone.

On 30 Dec 2013 Elisabeth Hjorth said:

Regina Derieva wrote the the world with the most severe love, a humorous gentleness and a true solidarity. But her poetry is not just the writing of the world, it perforates life and gives a glimpse of something not at hand. The depth of her voice will be missed.

On 26 Dec 2013 John Kinsella said:

Habit Hard to Break

for Regina Derieva

It’s a habit,
driving the back roads,
to lift a finger from the wheel
when passing a neighbour,
even a stranger. Just to let
them know you know,
that glimpse at speed,
the paddocks luminescent
after seeding, sprouting,
fence-wire zinging
with the crisp day
in a dry place;
sometimes,
you lift the finger
to spite yourself,
or against your better judgement,
or realise in passing that the other driver
tows a spray pod, boom-arms rucked up round its head,
nozzles dripping clear fluid — almost water —
along the asphalt;
even a ute with a sheep for slaughter
on the tray — the wish
not to have saluted
diluted by the knowledge
that you will salute again.
So all greetings
resonate throughout the district,
and the act keeps us from each other’s throats.
Under the sky’s umbrella
we prosper and grow sick
and vice versa;
together we eat from crops
we might plant by other means.

John Kinsella

On 23 Dec 2013 Malte Persson said:

During her life, Regina Derieva had to cross several well-guarded borders. Her poetry, truly international, crossed many more. It will continue to do so.

It is a privilege to have had the chance to meet her.

On 23 Dec 2013 Valentina Polukhina said:

Regina Derieva’s relationship with the world was severe and tender, truthful and tragic; it reflects her own tragic life as well as the tragedies of the country she was born in. Her poetry has a wide range of topics: from religious believes to everyday life. It can help to find a difficult answer to a difficult question; it can also comfort the reader or even cure.

Valentina Polukhina

On 22 Dec 2013 Håkan Sandell said:

I efterföljd till Seamus Heaney´s och Elena Schwartz´ gör Regina Derieva´s frånfälle samtidspoesins atmosfär tunnare och gråare.
Dikterna står kvar, som de når oss främst med de engelska tolkningarna, som en uppfordran till konstnärlig höjd och skärpa. Till att söka de tidlösa mått som återskänker nuet det självständiga tänkandets skala.
Jag tackar för de sena år som Regina Derieva gästade Sverige, och för en diktning så kompromisslös, och så varm.

On 22 Dec 2013 Tomas Venclova said:

Regina Derieva was, first and foremost, a Christian poet, a worthy heir of a long line of metaphysical poets, be they English, French or Russian. Far from any inflated rhetoric or didactics, her poems reached the very core of the Christian experience, which meant serious and fearless attitude to life, suffering and death. The imagery and syntax of the Gospels and the Books of Prophets was, for her, a natural element just as apocalyptic presentiments and mystical hope formed the axis of her world-outlook.

On 20 Dec 2013 Donald Rayfield said:

I discovered Regina Derieva when a year ago I was asked to review two books of her verse in English translation (in Translation and Literature (Edinburgh), vol. 22 (2013), pp 133-7). Of what I wrote, the following might be worth repeating:

Regina Derieva, though as productive a poet as Lipkin, is very different. She has in common with Lipkin a firm religious faith, and the scars of someone who has witnessed the GULAG. Unlike Lipkin, however, she is an inveterate exile, achieving the remarkable status for a Russian citizen of being deported from Israel to find sanctuary in Sweden. Her poetics, too, are very different: she has the ironic and curt observations of Anna Akhmatova, only ten times more acerbic, and she has the flow of similes and metaphors, inspired by extraordinary breadth of reading and of travels, of Josif Brodsky. Like Brodsky, she knows the poetry and prose of John Donne and the topography of London; unlike Brodsky, however, Derieva is impervious to alien influences. Her values remain rigidly Russian and Catholic (like the philosopher Piotr Chaadaev, whom she evidently reveres); she travels England as did Dostoevsky, Herzen or Goncharov, from one Russian-inhabited or Russia-saturated house and street to another, with the natives as mere exotic extras in her film-like sequence.

On 20 Dec 2013 Jim Kates said:

"God stirs together
mud, dust and grit
so that you can see again
an come to know
that a tear
is the very purest product
on earth."

Regina Derieva (tr. J. Kates in "Corinthian Copper," Marick Press)

On 19 Dec 2013 Annie Finch said:

With wit and courage, her poetry lives on.

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