War of the Beasts and the Animals is Russian poet Maria Stepanova's
first full English-language collection. Stepanova is one of Russia's
most innovative and exciting poets and thinkers, and founding editor of
Colta.ru, an online independent site which has been compared to
Huffington Post in its status and importance. Immensely high-profile in
Russia for many years, recognition in the West has followed the
publication of her documentary novel In Memory of Memory, first in
German translation in 2018 and now with Sasha Dugdale's English
translation - published by New Directions in the US - longlisted for the
International Booker Prize in 2021.
War of the Beasts and the Animals 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.
