Dance With a Shadow

Irina Ratushinskaya was only 28-years-old when she was sentenced to seven years' hard labour and five years' internal exile, accused of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. Her crime: writing poetry. She was held for three years in a "strict regime" labour camp, in a special unit for women political prisoners where she suffered beatings, force-feeding and solitary confinement in brutal, freezing conditions. But her poems were smuggled out of the camp, and published in 1986 by Bloodaxe in No, I'm Not Afraid, the book which spearheaded an international campaign which eventually secured her release. This new collection brings together over 50 previously untranslated poems written over the past 20 years, beginning with early work influenced by Russian ballads and pop songs, and later by her discovery of the banned work of the great Russian poets Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak and Tsvetayeva. Even in those poems written in the 1970s, many of which are about love and parting, there are premonitions of what was to follow. Dance with a Shadow includes over 20 poems from the labour camp which weren't in her two previous Bloodaxe collections, as well as poems written since she came to the West. It shows that despite her ordeal, her poetry has been remarkably consistent in its concerns and subject-matter. She has always been sustained by a deep personal faith and a courageous assertion of the human spirit, but often her imagin-ation and poetic gift have reflected this in unexpected ways, through her humour and in poems about mythical creatures, dragons and mice, friends, memories and Biblical subjects, poems for children. All these are represented in Dance with a Shadow in poems written before, during and after her imprisonment.