There is a line in Thomas Merton's Cable to the Ace where he declares: 'I think poetry must / I think it must / stay open all night / In beautiful cellars. In a haunting but beautiful way, Regina Derieva's poetry gives ample evidence of Merton's intuition about this imperishable art form. When I consider both her poetic achievement and her story, I am reminded of Merton's enthusiasm in letters to Boris Pasternak in Russia when he discovered that poet's poetry and fiction - and his political predicament. Derieva was born a Jewess. In 1991 she and her husband, Alexander, and their son, Denis, immigrated to Israel from Kazakhstan. In many ways they were not different from thousands of Soviet immigrants, except for the fact that in 1990 they took advantage of the new religious freedoms in the Soviet Union and were baptized Roman Catholics.
    In 1996, the Israeli High Court rejected their application for citizenship, nothing that Law of Return, which governs the right of Jews to settle in Israel excludes Jews, who have adopted another faith. However, in the Soviet Union Jewish identity had nothing to do with religion. Her husband had put 'nonbeliever' on the forms. Upon their arrival in Israel, Regina Derieva's conscience would not allow her to put anything but 'Catholic' on her new form. She is now in a political conun-drum: the Soviet Union no longer exists, so they cannot be deported; nor can they go to some other country because they have no passports.
The Derievs now seek refugee status so that they can at least settle in some other country.
    This Catholic convert who refused to lie fashions poems that ambush the heart and mind. It is the kind of contemporary poet that I would venture to say Thomas Merton would be reading today: a mixture of cultural and political vulnerability giving rise to hope. There is a freshness in the metaphors and imagery of her lean and original poems. She herself names it the "inveterate freedom" of wind and wave. They confirm Joseph Brodsky's perception about her work: 'The real authors here are poetry and freedom themselves.'
    The Russian roots of Derieva's imagination are evident in her lyric 'The Russian Songs' and 'From Absence'. Her own contemplative identity beckons from irony and tension of 'Winter Lectures for Terrorists' and 'De Profundis'. Her religious faith speaks to the soul of readers in poignant poems from 'The New Flowers of St. Francis'. And there is a Zen-like quality to her 'Maxims and Paradoxes on the Accidental Sheets' that remind one of Merton's later poetry.