writes about happiness.
Yes, about happiness, and not about childhood, music, coitus, betrayals, pregnancies, childbirths, the Creation, Russia, Mozart, black-and-blue marks, skates, jeans, bras, tears, or loneliness.
Winter and summer, musical scales and calligraphy lessons, adolescence and youth, lips and palms, sin and lust, fear and trembling, heaviness and tenderness, blood and love, life and death cease being mere words only when they are illuminated by happiness. — The Independent
This remarkable talent has her talent merited in countless festivals, readings, editions, working across languages, formats and disciplines. Visit her homepage. She will be visiting our friends at Pushkin House for an evening of poetry and music:
Letters to the Room Next Door
An excerpt of the evening & link to the event.
Pushkin House on Thursday, November 19 from 7 – 9 pm.
We are proud to welcome her on Saturday
November 21st from 6:30 at
Clementi House
Childrens Album of Tchaikovsky
Vera Pavlova is not only a world famous poet, author and playwright. She also graduated the Schnittke College of Music and the Gnessin Academy of Music, where she specialized in history of music and wrote her dissertation on the chamber vocal cycles of Shostakovich. She has worked as a guide at the Shaliapin Museum in Moscow, published several essays on music, and sang in a church choir.
To date Pavlova has published fifteen collections of poetry in Russian, of which “Vezdes” (“Here and Everywhere”), 2003, “Ruchnaya Klad” (“Hand-Carried Luggage”), 2006, and “Pis’ma v sosedneyu komnatu” (“Letters to the Room Next Door”), 2006, were acclaimed as The Best Book of the Year. The latter of these collections is a unique project in book printing: it consists of 1001 poems written out in Pavlova’s hand and illustrated with drawings done by her daughter when the girl was four years old.
Pavlova’s poems are compact, expressive, and easy to remember; one is tempted to quote every one of them, to show them to one’s friends, to offer them as toasts, to have them tattooed on one’s chest, to recite them on the subway and at the police station. (Yevgeniy Lesin, The Weekly Review of Books)
Pavlova can be quoted ad infinitum; her little book of one hundred pages explodes before your eyes like an airbag at the moment of impact, which makes the horizon vanish, and you are shocked, in pain, and feel grateful.
Enjoy her One Hundred Poems at
http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/128506/if-there-is-something-to-desire-by-vera-pavlova/