Sixty Years Selected Poems: 1957-2017

Mikhail Fyodorovich Yeryomin was born in 1936 in the northern Caucasus but grew up in Leningrad, where he studied in the Philology Department of the Leningrad State University and graduated from the Herzen Institute. Yeryomin is a playwright and a translator (of T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, W.B. Yeats, M. Ikbal, Khushkhal-khan Khattak, among others) who saw few of his poems published in his homeland during the Soviet period. Instead, his work -- consistently in eight-line stanzas rich with allusive scientific and linguistic byplay -- appeared in émigré journals like Kontinent and Ekho. The first volume of his poems (in Russian) was published in the United States in 1986, and then in 1991 in Moscow. Each book is a cumulative edition to and a selection from his previous work, and each carries the same title: Stikhotvorenia (Poems). So far, there have been seven of these (1986, 1991, 1996, 1998, 2002, 2005, 2013). Translator Jim Kates is a poet, a literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation for the Selected Poems of Mikhail Yeryomin (White Pine Press, 2014) and a Käpylä Translation Prize for translations of Aigerim Tazhi.