Pip: osoparavos.com is back, and this time the subject is sleep — or rather, the spectacular failure of it, and everything the mind does when it refuses to cooperate.
Mara: Adam Donaldson Powell brings us a dense, layered collection today — poems about insomnia and uncontrolled sleep, about the inner life of the poet, about desire and identity. It’s all gathered under one long Russian-language title that roughly translates as fleeting moments and lingering thoughts.
Pip: Let’s start with what it actually feels like to lose a night.
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Fleeting Moments, Lingering Thoughts
Mara: This segment lives inside the experience of sleep going wrong in every direction at once — not just insomnia, but its opposite, and then the mind’s refusal to surrender to either.
Pip: The opening poem, “Бессонница” — Insomnia — sets the whole thing up with an image that’s almost funny until it isn’t: “Овцы одичали — они отвергают загон, перепрыгивают рваными дугами мои мысли, цепляя шерстью края тревоги.” The sheep have gone feral. They’re not cooperating.
Mara: And the counting still happens anyway — that’s the trap the poem names. The mind keeps performing the ritual even after the ritual has stopped working. The sheep clear fences, the clock gets louder, and the speaker ends up “уже изнурённый самим актом не спать” — exhausted by the act of not sleeping itself.
Pip: Which is a very precise description of how insomnia compounds itself.
Mara: The second poem flips it entirely. “Неконтролируемый сон” — Uncontrolled Sleep — isn’t about lying awake; it’s about falling asleep mid-sentence, in buses, once while standing against a wall. Where insomnia is a siege, this is an ambush: “Сон не приходит — он нападает.” Sleep doesn’t arrive — it attacks.
Pip: And people laugh at that. The poem notes it directly — “тебе, наверное, повезло” — you must be lucky — said to someone who keeps disappearing out of their own life.
Mara: The third poem, “Осада бодрствующего разума,” holds the space between those two states — the waking mind under siege, bargaining with the dark for one more minute of consciousness, until the words dissolve into whisper and the sentinel abandons his post.
Pip: It’s the most formally ambitious of the sleep poems. The ceiling leans in and listens. Shadows measure the slow collapse of resolve. It earns its ending.
Mara: “Ночное странствие” follows — the dream itself, Jungian and vertiginous, clocks melting into reaching limbs, the speaker falling through sandstone ruins and prehistoric jungle into a galaxy of transparent emerald fragments, waking in panic clutching a glowing dial.
Pip: And then “Перезапуск ночи” is the aftermath — the room returning in pieces, the abyss gone but its echo still behind the eyes, the heart releasing its rhythm from alarm toward something almost like calm.
Mara: After the sleep sequence, the collection opens into three more poems that share the same emotional territory. “Четыре сонета по мотивам ‘Времён года’ Вивальди” moves through Vivaldi’s four seasons as formal sonnets — spring as birdsong threading light, summer as a storm that reveals fury hidden under torpor, autumn as harvest tipping into loss, winter as a teacher with a strict hand.
Pip: They’re beautifully controlled, and they rhyme the seasonal logic with the sleep poems — everything moves between abundance and depletion, between the body’s will and what overrides it.
Mara: “Жалоба поэта” — The Poet’s Complaint — is the one that costs the most to read. It names what the writing life actually takes: “Каждая строка оплачена отсутствием. Каждая метафора — мгновение, которое я не прожил, а разобрал, прикрепив к странице, как хрупкое крыло.” Every line paid for by an absence. Every metaphor a moment dismantled rather than lived.
Pip: The price being: friendships worn thin, love that stopped knocking. And still the speaker returns to the blank page because it feels more like home than any embrace.
Mara: The final poem, “Апология идентичности,” is the most confrontational — a first-person confession about desire structured around resistance. The speaker is drawn not to men but to their unspoken wounds, to those who won’t yield. When someone becomes available, they become invisible. The poem names this without softening it: “контроль — плохая замена завоеванию. Приручение — смерть желания.” Control is a poor substitute for conquest. Taming is the death of desire.
Pip: And the collection’s closing line asks what a person is without the story they refuse to give up — which lands differently after everything that came before it.
Mara: All of it — the sleepless nights, the seasons, the poet’s cost, the architecture of longing — circles the same question: what the mind does when it cannot rest, and what it makes from that.
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Pip: Fleeting moments, lingering thoughts — the title turns out to be the most accurate description of what the whole collection does to you.
Mara: It stays. That’s the point. Next time, we’ll see what else surfaces from osoparavos.com.
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