Larissa Miller is one of Russia's most highly-regarded writers - novelist, essayist and poet - and this selection from her collection "Between the Cloud and the Pit" (1999) spans her poetic output from the 1960s to the millennium. "Guests of Eternity" is a presentation, in chronological order, of poems written (but not published) in the three decades preceding glasnost' as well as the final decade of the twentieth century. Here are political poems from the '70s and '80s which speak openly about the horrors of the Soviet system, others which comment directly on purges and torture, and yet more which convey the struggle to grow and mature with one's soul intact in a world of suffering.Yet throughout this book, as Sasha Dugdale points out in her introduction, there are moments of hope, of a spiritual - even religious - dimension that afford glimpses of a transcendent world and bring peace of mind to the beleaguered soul. Larissa Miller is a consummate technician, combining simple words with complicated and intricate rhythms to produce apparently effortless poetry which succeeds in elevating the ordinary and commonplace to a higher plane. Described by her translator Richard McKane as 'a poet of all seasons, not only of the natural world, but of the soul', Larissa Miller writes with an intensity and a lyricism that is compelling, mesmerising and unforgettable.

Fate's Little Pictures is a bilingual poetry pamphlet by Larissa Miller, published by Arc Publications. Larissa Miller (b. 1940) is a major Russian poet and essayist, a member of the Union of Russian Writers since 1979, and of Russian PEN since 1992. Author of 23 books of poetry and prose, she was short-listed for the State Prize of the Russian Federation in Literature and Art in 1999, and in 2013 was awarded the Arseny and Andrei Tarkovsky Prize. Her autobiographical novel Dim and Distant Days was published in English translation by Glas in 2000, and a volume of selected poems entitled Guests of Eternity was published by Arc in a bilingual edition in 2008. A further bilingual poetry pamphlet, Regarding the Next Big Occasion, was published by Arc in 2015. Larissa Miller is also a teacher of English, and of a musical gymnastics system for women named after its creator, the Russian dancer Lyudmilla Alexeeva. She is married, with two sons, and lives in Moscow with her husband Boris Altshuler, a physicist and human rights advocate.