“Emotions run thinly across words of welcome and scorn, too fragile to penetrate the calloused skin of anyone, and yet the longing for something to grasp beyond the fishing on cold shores, the labels on cold bottles . . . “

This is a collection of earlier Yevtushenko, published in 1962, and the first translations of his work into English. It is also prior to his later celebrity and political controversies around his possible affiliations with the Communist Party, his work with Gorbachev and then Yeltsin, etc. So it is safe, I think, to consider these works as poetry without clouding the discussion at all.

And for that, these raw and tundra-imaged verses recall and revere his childhood years though hard-lived in war, his youthful struggles into adulthood, his conflicted ideas of loss, his surprising discoveries of friends and lovers, his anger at war and the Holocaust. The lengthy opening poem “Zima Junction” about his return to his home town is for me the most potent, with each section an ironically distanced re-meeting with companions of an earlier time in the rural Soviet state. Emotions run thinly across words of welcome and scorn, too fragile to penetrate the calloused skin of anyone, and yet the longing for something to grasp beyond the fishing on cold shores, the labels on cold bottles . . . 

Yevtushenko wrote verse in a drier time for Russian poetry; there is little here that we would describe as beautiful in image or craft. But likewise, even through translation, the words hold us to ironic distance and then on occasion dip unnervingly into intimacies.

If you’ve never read his poetry, this is a marvelous opening salvo of works.