Galina Rymboe

Rymbu wants her poetry to do more than describe the place she has left behind. If her poetry can be said to be about any place, it’s the milieu, in Deleuzian terms: a space where all manner of rhythms, histories, and stories are intertwined. Her work thus does not serve as an escape from the world, but as a way into it: an attempt to unearth almost forgotten memories, old habits, and older structures, to address the rivers drying up and the life that is withering – all the empty factories and deserted digs of the collapsed Soviet empire and of the predatory capitalism of Russia today. Among these bleak and dystopian ruins, Rymbu goes in search of love and intimacy. Though these “zones of defeat”, as she calls them in Time of the Earth, are devastated, she wants to make them inhabitable again.

Her poetry depicts a kind of life that transcends the repetitive and violent exclusion, exhaustion, and exploitation of bodies and worlds that define our society. Rymbu’s Time of the Earth can thus also be read as a utopian gesture. The title not only refers to the Anthropocene age, as geologists and climate scientist call the current period, in which humans, after centuries of exhausting our natural resources, have irrevocably marked the very soil; it also forces us to re-examine our relationships to the ground beneath us and to each other. The Anthropocene age is often described as a great acceleration, an era in which the long timespans of geology catch up with humanity’s brief spell and dethrone us as the center of our universe. What Rymbu’s work does is just a little different, as she tells the story overshadowed by that of the Anthropocene: she does not focus on humankind as conqueror, but on all those, not even just humans, who have been trampled and abandoned by the inexorable march of progress. Her poetry foregrounds unfamiliar rhythms that are slow, polyphonic, beyond the human; these very rhythms, Rymbu’s glorious poems suggest, can sensitize the reader to a life lived amidst the ruins of what we once called civilization.