October 5, 2005—Sergey Gandlevsk, considered one of Russia's greatest living poets, will read from his work Tuesday, October 11 at Oberlin College. Joining Gandlevsky in the reading will be his translator, the poet Philip Metres.

The free, public event will be presented at 4:45 p.m. in Hallock Auditorium, located in the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environment Studies, 122 Elm St. The reading is sponsored by the College's creative writing program and the departments of Russian and comparative literature.

Said to meld a slangy vernacular with traditional forms and meters, Gandlevsky's poetry is a witness to his underground life as a bohemian artist, traveler, and debauchee during the twilight of the Soviet regime. Metres' 2003 translation of   Gandlevsky's work--A Kindred Orphanhood: Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky--is the first English translation from his collected poems, Celebration, originally published in 1995.

"We can be grateful to Philip Metres for having introduced English-speaking readers to the astringent and unflappable poems of Sergey Gandlevsky," says poet and critic David Wojahn. "Like Weldon Kees and Alan Dugan, he is a poet of hard-won clarities, of classical formal concision combined with vernacular swagger. Gandlevsky, with his pugilist stance and lyric heart, is a major discovery."

Winner of both the Little Booker Prize and the Anti-Booker Prize in 1996 for his poetry and prose, Gandlevsky is the author of four books of poems; a memoir, Trepanation of the Skull (1996); a book of essays, Poetic Cuisine (1998); and a novel, Unintel (2001). His books consistently are short-listed for the top Russian literary prizes. He has been included in English translation anthologies 20th Century Russian Poetry: Silver and Steel (Doubleday Press, 1993), The Third Wave (University of Michigan Press, 1992), and In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era (Zephyr Press, 1999).

Metres teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University. His poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals, on buses in Bloomington, Indiana, and in the anthologies Best American Poetry (2002), In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era (1999), and the forthcoming Arab American and Diaspora Literature Anthology (2005). His books include Primer for Non-Native Speakers (a chapbook, Kent State 2004), and Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling 2004). He is currently working on two collections of poems, A House Without (a finalist for two book prizes), and Museum Pieces.