Maria Tumarkin reads to us in her native Russian and tells of the important role Joseph Brodsky played in her coming of age in 1980s Russia: 'No one was more important to me than him... I copied his poems by hand in my special notebooks and I think I learnt about what language can do by doing that.'
'A Part of Speech' and 'Elegy' from Collected Poems in English, Joseph Brodsky, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.
Maria Tumarkin writes books (three to date, with a fourth on the way), reviews, pieces for performance and essays; she collaborates with visual artists, psychologists and public historians. Her work has been published, performed, carved into dockside tiles, and set to music.