Mikhail Iliev

Verse of Love and Loss: Selected Poems Mikhail Iliev

Verse of Love and Loss is a selection of poems spanning ten years in Mikhail Iliev's life. Distinct clusters of imagery and emotion, as well as formal indicia like rhythm, rhyme and diction, characterize the time and space in which each poem was created. Thus, a series of impressions coalesce into a picture of Iliev's poetic development and emotional gait throughout these years. Reading Verse of Love and Loss is similar to feeling head over heels in love and waking every night with terror in your heart. It is like being lost in a dark cold wood, with no living thing around, and feeling utterly happy. With melancholy and mischief, the small and the sublime, a silly apple and grand elation, culminate in a nearly Eastern presentiment. There is no love without loss, no laughter without sadness, no there without here. Verse of Love and Loss is the ode to the great failure of logic in the face of feeling, the triumph of a life of dreaming over the dreaming of life.