Child Poet Visits

One Cambridge school yesterday played host to a world-renowned poet. And she's only 12 years old.

Nika Turbina, a child prodigy from the Soviet Union, attended classes at Buckingham, Browne and Nichols School and gave a reading of her work in her native language.

The poet's visit to the school was part of a one-week U.S. trip that also includes a stopover in New York City.

Before she read her poetry, Turbina experienced school as American students do. She sat in on some Russian classes and a drama class. "This school is like home. The classes are all very relaxed and very natural," Turbina, a native of Yalta, said through a translator.

After visiting classes, Turbina read portions of her poetry to a gathering of students. The students then had the opportunity to ask questions. They learned, among other things, that Turbina likes hamburgers and math. After her day at school, Turbina was taken on a tour of Harvard Square.

The child prodigy began her literary career at the age of five, when she composed her first poem. By the age of eight, she had completed her first collection of poems, called "First Draft." The recently published book, which has been critically acclaimed in international literary circles, is written in Russian and has been translated into English, French and Italian.

Turbina's poetry covers a wide scope--from death to war to family to nature--and is unusually sophisticated for a poet so young.

"I write about many things, things that I see, things that I feel, things that are going on all around me," she said.

In the introduction to the book, acclaimed Soviet writer Yevgeny Yevtushenko describes first meeting Turbina when she was eight and being very impressed with her poetry. The newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda" first published her work in 1983.

Since then she has received poetry awards, and a recording of her poetry readings has sold 30,000 copies in the Soviet Union.

No Ivies

The next stop on Turbina's tour is Newton North High School, and then she is off to Queens College in New York to meet with students and to continue reading her poetry. If she could add one more stop to her busy agenda, she said she'd "Go to Disneyworld in Florida because every child and every adult dreams about going there."

Turbina is scheduled to return to the Soviet Union at the end of this week. When asked what she would remember most about her trip to the U.S., she said, "the kindness and the graciousness of the American people."