Holy Winter 20/21 - Maria Stepanova

A deeply moving poem about winter and exile, war and the pandemic from "Russia's greatest living poet" (Poetry) and the acclaimed author of In Memory of Memory
The outbreak of Covid-19 cut short Maria Stepanova's 2020 stay in Cambridge. Back in Russia, she spent the ensuing months in a state of torpor—the world had withdrawn from her, time had "gone numb." When she awoke from this state, she began to read Ovid, and the shock of the pandemic dissolved into the voices and metaphors of a transformative, epochal experience. Her book-length poem Holy Winter, written in a frenzy of poetic inspiration, speaks of winter and war, of banishment and exile, of social isolation and existential abandonment. Stepanova finds sublime imagery for the process of falling silent, interweaving love letters and travelogues, Chinese verse and Danish fairy tales into a polyphonic evocation of frozen time and its slow thawing.
As a poet and essayist, Stepanova was a...