Arvo Mets

Arvo Antonovich Mets (rus. Арво Антонович Метс) (1937-1997) was a Russian poet of Estonian ancestry. He was an expert of Russian free verse. He also translated works of Estonian poets.

Biography

Arvo Mets was born in Tallinn in the family of an Orthodox father and a Lutheran mother. He educated at St. Petersburg Library University and at Literary Institute in Moscow. He lived most of his life in Moscow where he edited literary magazines. From 1975 till 1991 he worked in the magazine “New world” (rus. “Новый мир”). Arvo Mets was a chief of a literature club “In Taganka” (rus. “На Таганке”). His poems were published in the most prominent magazines of USSR and Russian Federation. During the life three books of his poems were printed. The book of posthumous works, which was published in 2006, became the first almost full collection of his texts. A lot of his poems were translated into English, Dutch, Hindi, Serbian and other languages.

Some of works of Arvo Mets.

Resemblance (translated by Anatoly Kudryavitsky)

Young girls
resemble in looks
the sky,
the wind,
the clouds above.

Later these girls make
devoted wives
whose faces remind us
of houses,
furniture,
carrier bags.

Still, their daughters
resemble in looks
the sky,
the wind
and streamlets in spring.

*** (translated by Alexey Artemov)

Desperate quiver
of aspen’s leaves
is an Aeolian harp
of our forests.

But people
don’t hear it.

Books

• “Swans above Chelny” (collection of poems of members of the literature union “Orpheus”, city Naberezhnye Chelny), Moscow, publishers “Proceedings”, 1981 (79 pages).
• “Stones of Tallinn”, Moscow, publishers “Proceedings”, 1989
• “Annual rings”, Moscow, publishers “Author” (the production union), 1992
• “Poems”, Moscow, publishers “State Museum of V. Sidur”, 1995 (the collective book),
• “In autumn forests”, Moscow, 2006, without publishers, series “Russian verse libre” (276 pages).

Texts in anthologies

• “X-Time”, Moscow, 1989
• “The anthology of Russian verse libre”, Moscow, 1991
• «A Night in the Nabokov Hotel: 20 contemporary poets from Russia», Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2006.

On the Web

• Poems of Arvo Mets in English

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Persondata
Name	Mets, Arvo
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1937
Place of birth
Date of death	1997
Place of death