SOURCE: Hoover, Marjorie L. “Review of ‘Paradise’: Selected Poems by Elena Shvarts.” World Literature Today 69, no. 1 (winter 1995): 174.

In the following review of ‘Paradise’: Selected Poems, Hoover contends that Shvarts is “a keen observer of everyday reality down to its dirty depths.”

The poet Elena Shvarts puts her title [‘Paradise’: Selected Poems] in inverted commas both to quote Peter the Great's name for the capital he wrested from sea marshes and to set off her own modern St. Petersburger's ironic attitude toward that city. Shvarts praises and blames more extravagantly in the poem “The Dump”; she calls the city “grand as Venice” and describes the garbage it generates, including shards of glass, torn book covers, “peaches' slimy shreds and berries' slippery bubbles.” The poem concludes: “May great thoughts bloom and rot in you … / O glorious dump, get to your feet and sing! / O Rosa mystica, the gods must hear...