Lesley Lebkowicz
The Petrov Poems
Pitt Street Poetry, 2013
In April 1954 Australia woke up to discover that Volodya Petrov, an attaché in the Russian embassy in Canberra, was also a colonel in the KGB and was planning to defect. The Petrov Poems charts the unfolding web of intrigue between Petrov, his colleagues in the embassy, and his contacts with the west. And the crucial role of his wife Dusya, thrust into a terrible crisis of conscience as the result of her husband’s actions and her past personal history.
“Lesley Lebkowicz’s impeccably researched collection should be entered in history prizes as well as poetry ones; she turns history from dry events into ones as well-fleshed out as Volodya himself. For, history is both a narrative and a series of poems.”
About the Author
Lesley Lebkowicz is the author of Crossing the Sky (Five Islands Press, New Poets Series 8, 2001) and the short fiction collection Washing My Mother’s Hair (2001) (as Lesley Fowler).
The Way Things Really Are (Buddhist Education Foundation, 2006) was a collaborative translation of the earliest Buddhist verse cycle in which she worked from literal translations of the Pali by scholars Tamara Ditrich and Primos Pecenko.
Her work is represented in several anthologies and she has read at venues and festivals around Australia. It has appeared on buses and been installed as part of a public art program in the paving in Canberra City. She was shortlisted for the David Campbell Award for poetry in 2006 and won it in 2007.
For many years she reviewed fiction and non-fiction for The Canberra Times. Lesley Lebkowicz was a child in Canberra when the Petrovs defected and breathed in the drama taking place a few streets from home.
