Heaven Is Not Verbose: A Notebook

Excerpted from Heaven Is Not Verbose: A Notebook by Vera Pavlova 

There are moments when I feel the universe expand.

...

Pick a piece of wood floating in the river and follow it down the current with your glance, keeping the eyes constantly on it, without getting ahead of the current. This is the way poetry should be read: at the pace of a line.

...

As I am learning to speak English, I catch myself saying in it not what I want to but what I can say. Then I realize that much the same happens when I speak my native Russian. Only in poems, at times, I manage to say what I want. On such occasions, I feel I am speaking not Russian but some other language that is truly my native.


...


The sense of life is in living to the fullest the moments when life seems to make sense.

...

The longer a poem, the weaker the impression that it has been dictated from above: Heaven is not verbose. Besides, the more you talk, the more you lie.