Philip Nikolayev

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Biographical note:  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.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712793
ISBN-10:  1844712796
ISBN-13:  9781844712793
Author:  Philip Nikolayev
Title:  Letters from Aldenderry
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  30-Nov-07
Extent:  136pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  8 mm
Weight:  204 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 16.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  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 avantgarde. 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.

Table of contents:
Eagles
Secluded
Thunders
Pyromania
A Key in the Puddle
Locked
Nostalgia
You Who
The Art of Forgetting
A Plaint on the Parting of Inversion from Poetry
Were I Not
Old Hell
Title Disease
Still Communicating
The Green Square
Tendency toward Vagrancy
Grizzly
Green Eye
Apple Seeds
Good Enough
Lunch
Nightcap
On Falling Asleep in August Hot Wee Hours
A Secret Open Secret
A Fund of Hedge Funds
Eternal City
Not Otherwise Thought
Diotima’s Lesson
Need to Talk
Hymn
Moi aussi j’aime les nuages qui passent la-bas
Odessa Herring 1983
Seeing
Stargazing
Discipline
A Stately Goodbye
For Stephen Sturgeon
“Things happen as if not happening . . .”
Hold that Thought
Unhappening
Morning
Facts of Life
“these pages turn cold in the wind . . .”
“In this vat of wishful hearts . . .”
Revolution
Homage to Paradox
Cicadas
Book Tongue
“My name is Wormswurst, I give back to men their Zen . . .”
Hotel
Sharks
Life
The Next Level
“I wish to live my life like a house insect . . .”
“Global bacteria local euphoria . . .”
Folklore
Urbane Suburbia
A Quarry of Words
19 March 2004
Crocodile
Farewell
A Midsummer Night’s Stroll
A Ghazal
Commencement Walk
I Am not Used to Using a Cell Phone
Poetry Month Poem
Rhetoric
Target Practice
The Cure
The Seeded Friend of Humankind Is Cashed
The Nut Club
Zeno’s Stoop
Offer
Ideers
A Letter to the Antipodes
Pensees
Ithinkistillcanhear
Ideas
“A taste that loves the classical cliché . . .”
Benares USA
In a Hospital
Nothing Changes
Philosophy & Rhetoric
One Sensation, Two Sensation
I’ll Write
Coastwise Lights
Suburbi Et Suborbi
Recollections
To Assuage
States of Affairs
A Silence within a Silence
Simple Joys of Food & Drink
Letters from the Past
Indian Summer
Modulo Feeling
Litmus Test
“God, empowered to the max . . .”
A Life, in 500 Words or Less
Earth

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Excerpt from book:  

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.

Unpublished endorsement :  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

Unpublished endorsement :  From its opening poem “Eagles,” with its marvelous spoof on what to make of signs and portents, to the astonishing memory poem “The Art of Forgetting,” to the final “Earth,” with its elegant heroic couplets, culminating in the line “The land has willows, something needs to weep,” Philip Nikolayev shows himself to be at once a master of the “natural” conversation poem as well as of the most witty and ingenious ghazals, sonnets, quatrain poems, and other fixed forms. In Letters from Aldenderry the reader experiences repeated shocks of recognition, accompanied by the pleasure of recalling that, yes, that’s how it is! How did this poet know it feels that way? This is a truly exciting collection of lyrics, as surprising and varied as it is original.

Marjorie Perloff

Review quote:  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