The Score of the Game

Shcherbina emerged in the early 1980s as the spokesperson for the new, independent Moscow culture. Her work was first published in the official press of the Soviet Union in 1986, and five volumes of her poetry were published in samizdat prior to 1990. Her poetry is now widely published in both established and experimental journals at home and abroad, and has been translated into Dutch, German, French, and English. Shcherbina's poetry blends the personal with the political, and the source for her material is pulled from classical literature, as well as French and German cultural influences.

"Still-Life"

Zing--Boom--Snap:

drop here and there drop

the seed senses the ground like a greedy trap.

Whether it needs to fall, it needs to stay put

as the uttermost prophetic white grasslet in the air

and kafka, with golden inks a crazy engraver

writes: "The seed succeeded, conceived immaculate."

The seed Zing--Snap--Boom:

sets out at random

either toward this mother or that mother

or swimming orphaned toward a leeside cutter:

hurrah, an oasis hurrah, an oasis

And all of it a mess

Snap--Boom--Zing:

my mother's a sun descended from yellow melons,

father a boomerang of moons a lunar elk,

between them a euclidean parallel:

il mirroring il, elle mirroring elle.The seed, mothlike, like trout

knocks knocks against the lantern's light

locked behind a glass door...

Still-life: pitch dark on market day.

Tatiana Shcherbina Shcherbina was awarded a Bourse de Creation from the French Ministry of Culture. After living abroad for several years in the early 1990s, she returned to Moscow, where she has served as editor-in-chief of the cultural journal Estet (Aesthete) since 1995.