“The sea is a postcard,” writes Nina Kossman. There is both something elemental in this vision and — iron-tough. Kossman’s poetics are very much in conversation with Tsvetaeva’s dictum “To live as I write: tersely.” …We need, Kossman tells us, to “learn to see / without eyes,” perhaps because we must “get used to death / before it’s here.” This is a beautiful, honest book.
– Ilya Kaminsky
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Nina Kossman’s insightful translation of Marina Tsvetaeva creates a unique verbal mirror in which the translator has discovered a unique lyrical voice as a bilingual poet.
– Zinovy Zinnik
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From Critics at Large:
The structure of her new book of interlacing conversations in verse, separated by space and time but not sentiment or spirit, is as dynamic as it is serene. The poet describes her approach as a kind of braiding together of her translations of Tsvetaeva with her own English poems, following a thematic approach, especially when one of her own works appeared to echo a motif in her elder’s work: “Although my poems were not written with Tsvetaeva’s work in mind, I found quite a few that can be seen as responses to her. Something is born of this strange pairing, a kind of tense new world. I place my poems beside Tsvetaeva’s not in competition but with humility. The aim is not to emulate her but to create a dialogue between her poem and mine, a resonance possible not only between two poets but between two eras. My goal is not to aspire to her heights, which are unscalable, as they are hers and no one else’s, but to approach her and to speak.” – Donald Bracket, from “Found in Translation: Across a Bridge of Words”
