Bio
Anatoly Kudryavitsky lives in Dublin, Ireland, and writes in both English and Russian. He has published two novels, a few novellas and short stories, seven books of his Russian poems and three collections of his English poems, Shadow of Time (Goldsmith, 2005), Morning at Mount Ring and Capering Moons (Doghouse, 2007 and 2011), as well as A Night in the Nabokov Hotel, an anthology of contemporary Russian poetry in English translation (Dedalus, 2006) and Bamboo Dreams, an anthology of Irish haiku (Doghouse, 2012). He edits Shamrock (http://shamrockhaiku.webs.com), the international online magazine of the Irish Haiku Society, of which he is President. His poems have been translated into fourteen languages.
Anatoly Kudryavitsky
Oasis
The demon of ready-made things erects Potemkin villages and other monuments to deception. The ghost named Torricelli busies himself with inflating mirages of culture. The imp called Do It Yourself ornaments a typically Kara-Kum landscape with small green bushes. In the evenings, the three of them watch grey flowers of decay open into a colourless twilight, and hiss their whispers into travellers' ears: 'If you're invited to an oasis, you surely are in a desert.'