GIORNATA

Irina Mashinski's poems in Giornata inhabit the landscape of elegy and exile, as well as the actual landscape of rural America. She forgets nothing, asking without self-pity, "Who's left?" These translations feel wholly original, rich in music, but mostly rich with the poet's sensibility, the tenderness with which she opens to her losses and offers them to us, like her grandmother's "Moscow teacups" an image so simple and so arresting.