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EVGENY VINOKUROV: The War Is Over (trans. by Anthony Rudolf and Daniel Weissbort). Carcanet Press, 266 Councillor Lane, Cheadle Hulme, Cheadle, Cheshire SK8 5PN, UK. 53pp/£2.00

Vinokurov, who has the reputation of being one of Russia’s most influential modern poets, matured early. In a manner, It was forced on him. During the last war he was in charge of an infantry section before his eighteenth birthday. Having lived the life of an hero, he feels he has little need to advertise the fact with the sound and fury of false heroics. Indeed, his style seems almost too modest in its restrained, conversational way - it is that of a man talking to another, chatting rather, about a common interest. Among several themes, the war often comes up; references to it, memories of it, are to be found in each of his collections. The early experience was obviously crucial to him in many respects.

     In general, the stimulus for his poems would seem to be a small thought or telling detail round which they are built, or towards the revelation of which they move. It is in Vinokurov’ s skill in handling such material that his success lies.

     The way, for instance, he describes how a fellow-soldier had his eyes blown out, ending, almost as if it were an afterthought, “I suddenly remembered for the first time : /My friend had pale blue eyes.” It is a technique he is to reverse in “I don’t remember him”, in which it turns out that, thought he can remember none of the everyday details about the soldier, he does remember an horrific maiming.

     Equally striking are the final lines of “Siberian Restaurant Cars” where, after a straight piece of socialist-realist reporting, he ends with an almost Chinese force:

Through the windows, unpeopled Siberia
And midnight forests stretching for a thousand miles.

     Often it would not be just to say Vinokurov’ s poems are about anything; they are, rather, reactions to a given stimulus and vary from the moodpiece to the epigrammatic. Some I found rather too sentimental, the overrunnings of a Slavic heart quick to take the immediate impression, the emotional view rather than the analytic. His writing might even be described as superficial, though that would have to be qualified in any case, this is often well disguised by a certain wry humour.

     The poems work on a plane beyond ratiocination. There is a strangeness about their combination of intuition and feeling which comes as a shock to someone unused to the way Russian writing has developed from Pasternak onwards. A Western reader might, therefore, be tempted to think there is something hit-and-miss about their perceptions. But the best are extremely compelling: Adam dreaming of his future progeny In Paradise and smiling at the ovens of Auschwitz because he has yet to learn what good and evil are; or the mother of Judas clinging to the corpse of her son and sobbing, “Why did these evil people destroy my son ?”

     Vinokurov is given to statements which are at variance with his actual practice, fashionable social-realist pronouncements such as “I am deeply convinced that objects/are more eloquent than words” and “Stoic stenographer, you have / created the twentieth century.”

     In actual fact he is dealing with associations, intuitions, things that he has to put into words and that have little to do with the real nature of the objects. His world is a mental one in which objects turn into symbols and tokens. Nevertheless, he succeeds in making us appreciate his inner life with admirable simplicity and even convinces us that the rich or sometimes sinister qualities he perceives in everyday things and circumstances are nothing out of the ordinary. Like the world in which he lives, his writing is deceptive; beneath the surface lies more than meets the eye.