About the book: year / There is not much left of most of us whom our contemporaries call poets. “Poetry is the same mining of radium” (Mayakovsky). This selection is made by readers - all types of readers that we are lucky enough to have. A few words about myself. I was born in 1920. Moskvich. I was lucky in my friends and teachers. The friends of my poetic youth were Pavel Kogan, Mikhail Kulchitsky, Nikolai Glazkov, Sergei Narovchatov, Boris Slutsky. Our teachers are Tikhonov, Selvinsky, Aseev, Lugovskoy, Antokolsky. I saw Pasternak. Met with Akhmatova and Zabolotsky. I talked with Martynov and A. Tarkovsky more than once. He was friends with Maria Petrov. The poetry school was strict. He fought. He was seriously wounded. He began publishing after the war. The first book was published in 1958. I have eight books of poetry (“Nearby Countries”, “The Second Pass”, “Days”, “Wave and Stone”, “The Message”, “The Bay”, “Voices Behind the Hills”, “A Handful”). My poems are most fully represented in the collections "Selected" (1980) and "Poems" (1985). Translated a lot. Of the great poets - Rimbaud, Apolinaire, Lorca, Brecht, Nezval, Tuwim, Galchinsky, Bazhan, Eminescu and many others. My poems have been translated into major European languages. Published in separate editions in several countries. David SAMOILOV