Foreword to the Inland Sea and Other Poems (The Divine Art, South Shields. 1999)

The poetry of Regina Derieva is an outstanding and unusual phenomenon.  It corresponds to the poetical experience of Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and Brodsky, and at the same time keeps pace not only with contemporary Russian but also perhaps world literature.  Regina Derieva is a modern poet who employs not only traditional but also free verse. Yet she writes out of time, or rather, in the time of the Old Testament and Revelation.  While reading Regina Derieva's poems, it occurred to me that tradition is something greater than only poetic tradition.  Her poetic creations call to mind the Word -- Psalms and Prophets, and especially the parables of the Gospels.
          Following elevated models, Regina Derieva sets in motion secret resources of speech, discovering its paradoxical nature.  Lively beat of dictionary, unexpected substitution of notions and interchange of bitterly re-interpreted quotations give her poetry profundity, and quite often, epigrammatical precision. Her images are rather capricious and elusive, at first sight even accidental; but this is deceptive accidention, which is only the other side of necessity.
          The world of Regina Derieva is our world, having reached a deadlock, our world, having moved away from God a great distance, such a distance that perhaps even God cannot easily overcome it.  It is the concentration camp zone, where space is turned into emptiness, and time turned into disappearance.  In such a perception of the world, Regina Derieva is not alone in our era.  But her poetry can be described as particularly non-sentimental and hard, which is guaranteed by faith (not too frequent nowadays).  Contemporary jargon of war and death collide, in her poetry, with the old language of freedom and life; absence of meaning converts into tense expectation of meaning, and consequently, into its clandestine presence; adjectives --  "mortal" and "immortal" -- again require authentic significance.
          The works of Regina Derieva -- prominent poet, essayist and prose-writer of the modern Russian Diaspora - should find readers beyond the bounds of the Russian language.

Tomas Venclova

Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Yale University.

Contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Republic