Genuinely comparative literary studies can struggle to find a suitable home. Academic Presses’ series often focus on a single literature or time period and books with a capacious scope and sweeping approach to literature run the risk of orphanhood. Ian Probstein's River of Time, with a subtitle that encompasses eight distinct elements, embraces its comparative identity. An interest in how each of the writers under consideration relates to time and history, often through the concept of Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotope, links nine Russian and Anglo-American poets. The volume of poetry quoted is in itself an anthology of significant Russian and English works on the theme of time and history and the lion's share of Probstein's study is structured around close readings of these examples and extended engagement with the scholarship around them. He finds “meaningful point[s] of intersection” (80) binding these poets in a “cosmic vision” (114) that develops their conceptions of time-space into a revelation of “the changing image of reality itself” (181).

The book is divided into six sections that progress chronologically from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first. While The River of Time is included in Academic Studies Press's “Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy” series, only two of the poets are Russian or east European Jews. Rather than through culture or heritage, the nine poets discussed in the book are united by a shared desire to situate their poetry in a particular relationship to history and, by extension, their lived experience of the world. The first section, dedicated to Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Maiakovskii, offers a detailed analysis of their poetry in the context of Futurism's paradoxical relationship to the past and tradition. Ultimately, their interest in language and avant-garde aesthetics furthered their need to come to terms (or be reconciled) with the present. Part two, the strongest section of the book, argues that Osip Mandel΄shtam, William Yeats, and Ezra Pound found shared sources and historical perspectives that allowed them to “reunite time, culture, and spirit” (85). Probstein analyzes their affinity for the past that links the forces of nostalgia and the weight of history in their poetry. In the third section, Probstein grapples with the voluminous scholarship on T.S. Eliot, particularly The Waste Land and Four Quartets, and unravels his work's complex understanding of reality and history (a combination of the mythical and the banal) as part of Eliot's “dialogue with humanity” (128). Here, the driving force is dialogism and the power of the intertext. Joseph Brodsky, the focus of part four, brings a degree of pessimism and skepticism into the discussion. His poetry was the product of his experiences in a totalitarian society, and thus for Brodsky history “cannot be trusted” (193). Probstein asserts that eternity, not history, is the more relevant category for Brodsky's interaction with time. The brief sections five and six diverge into contemporary American poetry by considering the works of John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein. Both poets utilize complex language and imagery to forge their own distinct position in history and culture.

The book’s structure and editing are inconsistent. Chapters range from over forty pages to under ten; some poems are cited in English translation and the original Cyrillic, some in translation with a transliteration of the original, and some giving only the translation; and there is at least one major factual error (Zinaida Vengerova was Semen Vengerov's sister, not wife, as claimed on page 70). For a study that hinges on uniting a multitude of literary movements and traditions, the lack of a conclusion is perplexing. Ultimately, the impression made by this book is of a collection of articles that are thematically connected but stylistically and methodologically disparate. Nevertheless, it does offer a path for comparative studies of Russian and Anglo-American modernism. Complementing such outstanding works as Kirsten Blythe Painter's Flint on a Bright Stone and Rachel Polonsky's English Literature and the Russian Aesthetic Renaissance, Probstein's work demonstrates the potential for deep resonance between poets separated by time, space, history, and language.