About this audiobook
Afanasy Fet's lyric poetry attends to fleeting changes in nature and feeling. A sound, a movement of light or a remembered encounter can become the centre of a poem, carrying an emotion that is suggested rather than fully explained. Love and the surrounding world often appear as inseparable parts of the same moment of perception.
Rhythm and musical phrasing shape the experience as strongly as the images themselves. The poems move between immediacy and recollection, allowing a brief impression to hold a larger emotional history. Their concentration asks the reader to notice how small differences in language can alter the atmosphere of a scene.
This selection offers an approach to a poet concerned with the difficulty of giving words to transient experience. Its subjects invite close attention to beauty, desire and memory, showing how a lyric can preserve the intensity of an instant while leaving some of its meaning open and unspoken.
