Tag: Seagull Books

Voices that must be heard: Under a Pannonian Sky – Ten Women poets from Hungary, edited by Ottilie Mulzet

By the wine-press house, the road turns off
to the right, I see low village roofs

through the mountains, on roads burnished blue,
I’m a stranger here, for I intrude

no one in sight, only acacias, vineyards
sand-built houses beneath antennas

between wine cellars, under the Pannonian sky
a small donkey—grey prophet—walks by

waves back with ears of mother-of-pearl
respectable plebians once lived here

five hundred years ago, the wandering carts
of merchants left their traces in these parts

(from “Under a Pannonian Sky” by Ágnes Gergely, translation Ottilie Mulzet)

The Pannonian or Carpathian Basin is an extensive lowland area located in southeast central Europe that contains most of modern Hungary, and extends into a number of surrounding countries. It carries, in its soil, a rich geological and historical legacy that reaches far back in time. Many different cultures have passed through the region, and the poem above, by Ágnes Gergely, kindles the spirits of those who have, in the past, sheltered under the vast skies, and made the land their home. As such it is the ideal piece to lend its title to this remarkable anthology celebrating ten amazing Hungarian women poets, many who are appearing in English translation for the first time.

Edited by translator Ottilie Mulzet, the poetry collected in Under a Pannonian Sky spans several generations from Ágnes Nemes Nagy, born in 1922 , one of the most widely recognized Hungarian poets, to Anna T. Szabó born in 1972, whose work examines closely the motherhood and the role of women in contemporary Hungarian society. Naturally the turmoil and dramatic upheaval witnessed over the past century—the Second World War, the rise of communism in Hungary, and the disorientation of the early post-1989 years— feature throughout this anthology and all leave their mark, sometimes in deeply personal ways, on the lives of these women.

In her extensive and detailed Introduction, Mulzet sets out the origin and evolution of this project, which took place over a number of years, and offers a general framing of the authors at hand within the context of the restrictions faced by writers in the immediate post- war years, which was then followed by a significant cultural relaxation in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Mulzet notes that none of the poets in this volume were forced to make accommodations to censorship and that “it is a tribute to the strength and continuity of Hungarian literary culture that women writing today are still influenced by this seminal cohort of poets.” She then proceeds to consider each woman individually —the anthology is ordered chronologically—considering her background, her formative experiences, and the unique inspirations and qualities of her work. With such a substantial volume, and such a generous selection of poetry from each contributor, one might be well advised to read this introductory section in segments, one poet at a time, so as to best acquaint oneself with each poet’s history, style and tone just before reading her poems. Further, this anthology not only celebrates the work of ten poets, it also involves the dedicated work of six translators—Mulzet herself, of course, plus Anna Bentley, Erika Mihálysca, Clare Pollard, Ivan Sanders, and George Szirtes.

Although each writer comes from a unique background with her own distinct points of reference, the intersection of the personal and the political is clearly reflected in the voices of every poet featured in Under A Pannonian Sky. Between Nemes Nagy at one end of the chronological spectrum and Szabó at the other,  we are invited to spend time with the work of Zsuzsa Beney (1930–2006), Ágnes Gergely (1933– ), Gizella Hervay (1934–82), Magda Székely (1936–2007), Zsuzsa Takács (1938– ), Zsófia Balla (1949– ), Zsuzsa Rakovsky (1950– ), and Krisztina Tóth (1967– ). Their creative years may span some eight decades (while some are yet at the height of their careers), but there are concerns that recur throughout, albeit in differing forms and intensities.

For some, a devastating personal loss—of a parent, spouse, child, or extended family members as a result of deportation, tragedy, or misfortune—directly influences their poetic explorations, but, for women writing through successive periods of major historical and social change, it is not unexpected to find an underlying sense of loss and grief expressed more broadly. Likewise, it not uncommon to find attention to metaphysical questions, meditations on mortality, reflections on identity, and a focus on memory in the poems gathered here. In fact, it is striking in reading this anthology, how these poets tend to be willing to take on big questions of life and death, be it through grand scenes, mythology, dreams and fears, or in the significance of everyday affairs as they confront what it means to be a woman in her many dynamic relationships with others, and a Hungarian citizen in the modern world. Each poet, in her own way, confronts these challenges with a particular strength and resilience.

Now, if an anthology so rich and varied demands an Introduction that looks at each contributor separately, it would be cumbersome for a general review to attempt a passing glance at every poet. Rather, I wanted to be able to express how impressed I am by the power and diversity of the work presented here, and note how intrigued I am by the darkness that so often comes through. Gizella Hervay, for example, had an especially tragic life. She was born in Romania in 1930, and experienced a difficult, impoverished childhood in Budapest during the height of the war and the siege of the city. After the war she moved back to Romania where she studied Hungarian literature and began to write. By the early 1970s, she was becoming recognized for her poetry, but misfortune soon followed when her poet ex-husband died by suicide in 1976 and she lost her fifteen year-old son in the 1977 Bucharest earthquake. She would ultimately take her own life before reaching the age of fifty, but before that she published more than eleven volumes of poetry. Her work tends to be terse and grim, speaking to the traumas she witnessed:

Blood Dries
on the face of the earth

worries
tear up the trees from the root

nights squat
under pimpled sky

in shop windows
smashed in brows

skulls studded
with stones

(“Blood Dries” translated by Erika Mihálycsa)

Sixteen years younger than Hervay, Zsuzsa Rakovszky grew up in Sopron on the Austrian border which was closed until 1989, and where she still lives today. Her father died when she was very young, but she recalls a peaceful childhood and early exposure to literature. Her work draws inspiration from objects and photographs from the socialist years of the 1950s and 60s, and calls attention to the fate of ordinary lives, not only in an era of restraints and restrictions, but in the confusion of the immediate post-1989 years. The imagery of her poetry is often strikingly crisp and vivid, but it carries a heavy sense of history and alienation. The past is a ghostly presence, reflected in the dreams and hallucinations that frequently appear.  In, for example, “In an Alpha State” (translation Otillie Mulzet) surreal visions of heaven, and maybe hell, evoke the mood of the early 1990s, the hopes and fears of citizens as they faced the chaos of disruption and regime change:

‘I saw a city which exists in no land.
Between earth and sky: the meeting place,
lengthwise, of two points. There was neither sun nor moon,
no season ever passed, no time of day.
Into the narrow intervals, yellowish fog loomed,
nothing could be seen beyond the window frames.
Like a giant amoeba’s body, the fog swallowed it all,
began to eat away at the borders of all things:

‘no more difference between the living and the dead,
between dark and light, between good and bad.
I saw a man breastfeeding a snake,
I saw a woman swear allegiance
to a microwave. My own mother became
a fire hydrant. Behind the dense fog
endless battles raged, houses fell to rubble,
the main bus station swept away by floods,
boats sunken in flame-devoured water.
Yet none of this was real in any way.

It would be difficult to pick a favourite among the ten exceptional Hungarian women poets presented in this excellent anthology, but Rakovszky, who is also a well-respected novelist, is one that I would definitely like to come to know better. There were, however, so many poems that simply stopped me in my tracks throughout this volume, as a flurry of page markers erupting from my copy attest. For anyone interested in Hungarian poetry in general, and the responses of Hungarian women writers to the shifting social and political terrain of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in particular, Under a Pannonian Sky is essential reading.

Under a Pannonian Sky: Ten Women poets from Hungary, is edited by Ottilie Mulzet and published by Seagull Books.

In response to a broken world: Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances by Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer

The striking title of this far-ranging intellectual and artistic collaboration between Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer comes from Hölderlin’s unconventional translations of the Pindar Fragments:

The lonely school’s capacity for the world. The innocence of pure knowledge as the soul of intelligence. For intelligence is the art of remaining faithful in changing circumstances, and knowledge the art of being sure in one’s understanding in the midst of positive errors. If our understanding has been exercised intensely, it retains its strength even in diffusion; inasmuch as it easily recognizes alien things by its own honed sharpness, and so is not easily confused in uncertain situations.

Although the full passage does not appear until the final section—or Station— of this richly illustrated, interactive volume, the titular statement, that intelligence is the art of remaining faithful under shifting circumstances, clearly reflects the spirit guiding the discussions, observations, and speculations that shape this work. It is set out on the opening pages in an extract from a conversation between Kluge and Kiefer held on July 5, 2023, at the French Cathedral in Berlin, the day before Kiefer was awarded the German National Prize. It is a concept to be understood as realism. The artist insists that intelligence isn’t a skill:

Like all art, it doesn’t arise in your head, but in your fingertips. Intelligence feels things out, makes attempts, has character, it observes, it’s awake and constant, it takes decisions quickly, yet it knows how to wait patiently.

Like a physician, an architect building a cathedral, a mathematician or physicist. Kluge and Kiefer trade ideas and illustrations back and forth as they seek to interrogate what it means to remain true to oneself in a broken world.

Over the following ten “Stations”—one might describe them as points of intersection of ideas and images—that comprise this volume, Kluge, the writer and filmmaker, and Kiefer, the artist, explore how they and others have endeavoured to exercise their intelligence. Themes and subjects are drawn from Kiefer’s artwork. The inspiration he derives from history, literature, poetry, science, and mysticism is reflected in Kluge’s companion commentaries and experimental short films (accessed via QR codes), and expanded upon in excerpts from the above noted July 2023 discussion between these two important German artists. The result is a dynamic, multi-faceted enterprise.

Kluge and Kiefer each operate in different mediums that combine the ancient, even prehistoric (writing and painting) with the modern (photography and film), and exercise their own distinct understanding of the world with openness, curiosity, and conviction born of experience and experimentation, but their work, in their respective mediums and spaces, meets, as Kluge describes it, tangentially. This is an ideal plane for their collaboration. They discuss, they debate, they agree, they agree to disagree, but throughout it is clear they hold each other in the greatest esteem. Into their collaboration they welcome the contributions and voices of many others, including Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Celan, Joyce, Robert Fludd, and Johannes Kepler. Kluge’s characteristic observations, anecdotal in tone with a tendency to walk a very fine line between the factual and the fantastic, bring in classical mythology, military history, Kabbalistic wisdom, mathematics, and music to provide context and counterpoint for Kiefer’s paintings and sculptures which are reproduced, in detail and in whole (especially meaningful for anyone who has seen Kiefer’s  textured wall-sized paintings in person and knows just how difficult it is to capture the experience in any meaningful way with the camera on your phone).

Each Station has one or more themes, for example, “Tractate on Money, Love, Power and Truth / Four Currencies that Rule Our Lifespans,” “Stories of Exodus,” and  “Finnegan’s Wake and the Construction Site of Words,” just to name a few. There is natural flow and balance between discussion and direct commentary about Kiefer’s displayed artworks and Kluge’s embedded films, and the wide-ranging reflections and observations that surround them and at times veer off in unexpected angles. As Kluge notes:

One of the most surprising effects of great art is its ability to open up new directions. Emblems, perspectives, groundwater of experience emerge, no matter how old, how lost the underlying basis of experience may be. The panel pictures cannot be large enough. They are works of art, but they are also ‘the street signs of experience.’  

If you have not yet encountered one of Alexander Kluge’s books, collaborative or otherwise, especially the latter volumes with integrated multi-media, they can be difficult to contain or adequately describe in a review. There is a sense that they are larger on the inside than one at first suspects. They must be experienced. This particular work, translated by Alexander Booth who has ushered into English a good number of Kluge’s recent publications, is the latest to appear (although Kluge sadly passed away earlier this year at the age of 94, there may be more to come) and the perfectly-matched and well-timed collaboration with Anselm Kiefer makes it especially powerful. And intelligent.

Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances by Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer is translated from the German by Alexander Booth and published by Seagull Books.

“I don’t know, Heinz, are you the one or aren’t you?” My Mother’s Silver Fox by Alois Hotschnig

The past is so long ago. A lot is certain and clear—there are documents. But I was only a few years old at the time, so it’s difficult: I only know what I experienced physically. That I do know. But the paths, the detours we followed, even the ones I was there for, those I have to imagine.

Heinz Fritz grows up haunted by a past filled with mystery, secrets, ghosts. He is the son of a Norwegian woman who fell in love with a wounded Austrian soldier she was caring for during the Nazi occupation of Norway. When she discovered she was pregnant, she was forced to leave. As the daughter of the mayor of the northern town of Kirkenes, her circumstances made it impossible for her to stay. It seems that her soldier accompanied her to Oslo, and from there she travelled alone to his hometown of Hohenems, where she was to live with his family. But somehow the plan goes awry. Something happened in Berlin, something which remains unexplained, and although she reaches her destination, soon after Heinz is born in late 1942, she falls ill and he is taken away from her. He ends up fostered out to a farmer and his wife near Lustenau until his mother suddenly arrives to claim him four years later. Mother and son then live together, happily if precariously, for several years until she meets and marries a man named Fritz with whom she will have two more children. But Heinz’s stepfather is cruel and his mother emotionally fragile,  prone to frequent epileptic fits, leaving him uncertain where he belongs, if anywhere. It doesn’t help that his mother regularly questions whether he really is her Heinz, or whether he’d somehow been mixed up with another as an infant.

An unsettling and inspiring meditation on memory, identity, and the power of love and resilience, My Mother’s Silver Fox, by Austrian writer Alois Hotschnig, is the story of one man’s attempt to untangle the truth of his own history as he looks back over almost eighty years of life. Heinz  longs to understand his origins, but he has surprisingly little to go on at first. Whenever he asks his mother about her past or his real father, she inevitably falls into a seizure, so he stops asking. The bits and pieces of information he manages to gather over time, whether close to home or when he finally visits Norway with his mother, contradict one another. The only seemingly solid documentation he possesses is an itinerary charting his mother’s journey from Oslo to Hohenems, apparently under the auspices of the Lebensborn, the secret SS initiative designed to promote racial purity and build an Aryan race.

If marrying Fritz is his mother’s attempt to find stability, eight year-old Heinz finds that settling down offers him no sense of security. His stepfather seems most intent on teaching him to slaughter animals, so he copes by what he describes as relocating internally. He discovers that it is possible to hide inside his own imagination. His earliest realization that such a possibility exists comes when his mother reads to him from her cherished copy of Peer Gynt. Although the text is in Norwegian, he understands it because each time she reads it she becomes Peer Gynt’s mother, dramatically performing her death for him. It is a performance she repeats as his mother too, so often in fact that he finds it hard to tell when she is acting and when she is actually having a seizure. Each time she is there, but not there:

No one knew where her journey took her. But I wanted to get away from there too, ideally with her, and so I tried to go on the journey the same way she did and practiced falling down and falling over. I portrayed what went on before my eyes, I re-enacted it, actually, as I re-enacted everything that scared me in order to get hold of it. No matter how often I witnessed them, her episodes shocked me every time. And they attracted me. Everything that frightened me also attracted me and in the way that my mother enacted Åse’s ascension to heaven, I tried to accompany her on her journeys. I wanted to understand and I wanted to feel the strength she had in those moments when she was unconscious.

So, Heinz learns from his mother that he can find refuge in acting; by performing he can be protected from that which threatens and frightens him, through private fantasies and later on a makeshift stage in his backyard. But, soon he becomes hungry for more inspiration than the tattered magazines his family subscribes to and when a friend lends him a copy of his first proper book—Bram Stoker’s Dracula—he is completely consumed by the main character, terrified and obsessed. “I almost didn’t survive my first book,” he tells us, “but I let it happen because without this book I certainly would not have survived, I sensed that, too.” From that point on, he cannot help but surrender to the heroes of books he reads or films he sees, and eventually, every role he takes on in the theatre as a professional actor.

But the road to the theatre is a long one. Heinz’s childhood and adolescent years are difficult. By the age of fifteen, after only seven years of schooling, he is working full-time in an embroidery factory to help support his family. His stepfather is dying, his mother is often hospitalized, and he has two younger siblings. As close as he is to his mother, she remains a mystery, one that deepens as her illness progresses. When he does find out who his real father is and where to find him, he is not welcomed, or even acknowledged. In his absence, he longs for a true father figure of some kind, someone lasting, but instead he finds a series of men who pass through his life, each making some important contribution. They can’t, however, fill in the missing past. When, at the age of sixty, Heinz finally does meet his real father, there are some answers, but are they even true?

There is a haunting, almost diaphanous quality to this circuitous first person narrative, so thoughtfully translated by Tess Lewis who has also translated two of Hotschnig’s earlier works. The tone is cautious, the style halting, with italics used generously for emphasis and to indicate uncertainty. It is as if Heinz is sorting his story out as he tries to tell it. He is an actor, after all, so he is inclined to perform his life, as he once staged recitals in his childhood backyard, relying as much on his imagination as on the scattered facts he knows, or thinks he knows, for sure. Ultimately, the unfilled and conflicting elements of his account reflect so many of the secrets that persisted in the wake of WWII, and even more powerfully so because Heinz Fritz’s life echoes (with permission, Hotschnig notes) the real life story of Austrian actor Heinz Fitz. The final result is mesmerizing.

My Mother’s Silver Fox by Alois Hotschnig is translated from the German by Tess Lewis and published by Seagull Books.

A jay in the grass is a turning point in history: In a Cabin, in the Woods by Michael Krüger

There must be a crack in the fabric of the house,
the candle flickers as if it can’t decide,
and the piece of paper on which I’d been
scribbling all day long, trying to find a beginning,
lies on the floor, butter-side down.
But the doors and windows are all tightly closed.
A beginning of what?

—from poem #13

When we look back now at those eerie early months of the pandemic, when we all retreated, each to his own quarters, surfacing only with masks and the niceties of prescribed social distancing, it all seems so far behind us. Afterall, even if the virus is still circulating, any hope that humanity would emerge from isolation united has been proven to be extremely naive. But for many creative professionals—artists, musicians, writers—that period offered an unexpected opportunity to turn inward and focus on their art in a newfound, if temporary, silence.

For German writer and poet Michael Krüger, quarantine was especially critical. He had just begun treatment for leukaemia when Covid-19 hit, and was also suffering from shingles, so his immune system was very fragile. He and his wife took refuge in their house in a rural area near the Starnberger See southwest of Munich where he was under strict orders not to leave the garden (advice he tried to abide by). Inspired by the scene unfolding outside his window as spring fitfully made its way towards summer, and by brief excursions out into the immediate surroundings, he crafted a cycle of fifty poetic meditations on nature, existence, aging, and writing. He sent twenty of these poems to the Süddeutsche Zeitung where they were published weekly in 2020, before the complete sequence was released in a single volume, Im Wald, im Holzhaus, in 2021, at a time when the pandemic was still an ever present concern. Now this sequence is available in Karen Leeder’s generous English translation as In a Cabin, in the Woods.

As Krüger closely watches and records the seasonal transformations around him, the activities of birds and other small creatures, he cannot ignore the news that filters in from the outside world, nor can he express his reaction to it all without reference to the writers and composers whose words and music have long been his companions. The tone is contemplative, but not without humour:

The cuckoo is back, the long-haul flier, still a little tired
from its nighttime journey over Spain, France, the Alps,
but I heard it this morning, after the news, as I stood
before the mirror asking myself whether it was still
.       worth shaving;
as I greeted Cioran, Canetti and Blumenberg, all of whom
have asked this same question after the news, and the world
has nevertheless squeezed out another spring each year,
even if there’s always something missing that cannot
.      be replaced,
maybugs, for instance, that were only put in the world
to serve as supper for the cuckoo.

—from poem #10

The poems that comprise this sequence, with their detailed observations of the natural world, tend, in a sense, towards the Romantic. Among the many poets who are summoned along the way, it is Hölderlin who appears most frequently. Krüger even notes with regret that “Corona” has foiled plans for celebrations of the great poet’s anniversary. But then illness, his own and the virus sweeping the globe, has altered so much, suspending so many assumed certainties. The familiar rhythm of the seasons is a comfort, an assurance of continuity, but one that can only go so far. Krüger, tugging at the edges of his enforced confinement and weighed down by all the books of human history he’s consumed, ventures out beyond the garden to connect with life again, only to find himself wanting to retreat once more:

Two dogs approach me, then they stop and growl.
Dogs smell fear, my grandfather had drummed into me,
so I drive them away, shouting loudly, and return proudly
to the community of the fearful, loners and eccentrics,
who are loathe to negotiate with the strong. When the great crisis
becomes a permanent state, the third world war will have
broken out, without us noticing. The pigeons stagger about
like orthodox snobs in grey tailcoats, and two woodpeckers
cross the meadow like men of the world, as if tall grass were
a ludicrous whim of nature. I want to go back to my story
about a man who, with a melancholy gesture, gives up everything
he is and has, in order to be the most confident among all
the disappointed prophets. The sparrows seem like a barrel
.      of laughs.

—from poem #33 (62)

Yet, even though his specific medical circumstances arise on occasion, as do broader concerns about philosophical and political disruptions, past and present, the overall mood of this sequence is idyllic. The timeless beauty of the natural world is measured against the very real, if only half understood, reality upending the other commercial and political world that suddenly seems so present in the news, but still so far away. As he tells us, “I am one of those who came into the world old. / For me, nature should always be beautiful and terrible, / and a jay in the grass is a turning point in history” (#24). Reading these poems now, only half a dozen years after they were written, makes one almost nostalgic for the thoughtful melancholy of those early months when the everything seemed to grow quieter and the sound of airplanes passing overhead was replaced by birdsong. It is disheartening to see the way our societies and nations have become, in the intervening years, not more united and compassionate, but more divided and, in many places, hostile.

In a Cabin, in the Woods by Michael Krüger is translated from the German by Karen Leeder and published by Seagull Books.

Even in these half-dark times: The World Is Made Up Every Day by Alok Dhanwa

The lights on the bridges
have no end
My nights are full of them
I will remember
the lights
even in the face of death

– from “Theatre”  (1996)

In recent years, Seagull Books has been bringing the work of under appreciated Hindi cult writers to English audiences, via the translations of Saudamini Deo. The latest writer to receive this attention is  Alok Dhanwa whose defiant and socially engaged poetry combines the personal and the political with deep emotional and intellectual intensity. Born in Bihar in 1948, just one year after India’s independence, Dhanwa grew up alongside his country, witness to its many growing pains. Against the backdrop of the rising Maoist, Naxalite and other Communist movements in the late 1960s and the tumultuous 1970s under Indria Ghandi’s leadership, including the twenty-one month Emergency (1975–77) during which constitutional and civil rights were suspended, there was much for a young working-class poet to speak to—and against. Often drawing on rural themes and imagery, his poems addressed, directly and indirectly, the struggles of ordinary people, earning him a popular cult like status in Bihar and neighbouring states of northern India.

Unsurprisingly, relatively little of his poetry was published during these earlier years. His first collection, The World is Made Up Every Day, did not appear in Hindi until 1998 and was, until recently, his only published volume of work. Now his voice can finally be heard in English, through the resounding notes of Deo’s translation. (Brief YouTube videos of Dhanwa reading in Hindi can be found online and offer a taste of his tone and character that can be carried into reading his poems.) And although the particular political context of his poetry—even when the settings are decidedly bucolic—is essential, in her Translator’s Forward, Deo cautions that to read Dhanwa simply as a poet of the past would be a mistake:

Contemporary Indian milieu is far more complex, with its growing shift towards majoritarian politics and authoritarianism. His lines ‘that India no longer exists / the one in which I was born’ hauntingly resonates with the contemporary reader. Or when he writes: ‘Homicide and suicide are made to look alike / in these half-dark times. Do spot the difference, my friend,’ it feels as though he is speaking about present day India. And, perhaps, there is no end to these half-dark times.

One might venture that such a sentiment has a resonance far beyond India these days. As such, in Dhanwa’s poetry, there are many notes that may ring familiar.

There are direct, often angry, even despairing, references to political violence and oppression in some of the poems collected here, and a certain melancholy when the poet considers his country and the men and women he sees, be they gathering in city centres or working on farms. Dhanwa demonstrates a wonderful facility for employing striking imagery from nature and from everyday objects to  address the concerns that trouble him, as a man and as a poet. The poet, in his vision has a critical role, he or she is tasked to speak to both the immediate and the future. Thus, his is not merely an artistic role, it is at once ancient and urgent, yet he takes it on with a measured humility. In “Water” (1997), he begins with his imagined mission:

People, but not just people,
I believed I would teach
even water to inhabit India.

I believed
Water would be simple—
like the East,
like a straw hat,
like candlelight.

In the golden hour,
the other side is barely visible,
leading us to wander
in a country
yet to appear on the map.

But he ends up wondering if all the words we write are wasted, leading to ruin as water follows its own course in spite of us. He asks:

Do the voices of water
remain in the voices of women?
And what of other voices?

In a sad and broken heart
there is only the night of water.
There lies hope, and there lies
the only path back into the world.

Many writers have, over the years, been described as giving voice to the marginalized, but for Dhanwa this is not simply a matter of speaking on the behalf of those who cannot. In his world, those who might be imagined to be on the disadvantaged side of the endless class struggle are not content to stand by quietly. And he is standing with them. He also holds a perspective that extends beyond the joys and the demands of the everyday—it is civilizational in scope. His world view is not static; it is in motion. In one of the longer pieces in this book, “Canvas Shoes” (1979), he begins with a pair of old canvas shoes left by the railway tracks and imagines a life for this worn and humble footwear that entails a long journey that echoes the history of the world:

These canvas shoes
soft and filled with air
as cigarettes and handkerchiefs.
Woven like nests—
against solid things in this world like murder and rape,
these liquid shoes stand
bending with grass and language,
edging closer to salt—
And for the rats, these canvas shoes are like the alphabet—
it’s where they begin to nibble.

Here, simple shoes carry the density of human existence—in the day to day and over  vast swathes of time. By the final verse the journey is complete yet eternal:

Those canvas shoes are now so old
that one might say,
wherever they move, Time doesn’t exist—
even Death would no longer want to wear them.
But poets do wear those shoes
and tread across centuries.

In the end it is the poet who is tasked with continuing the journey and translating it into words. To speak to the indefatigable human will to resist, to survive. Something that Alok Dhanwa is well versed to do.

The World is Made Up Every Day: Selected Poems by Alok Dhanwa is translated from the Hindi by Saudamini Deo and published by Seagull Books.

People look so human: Becoming Animal by Teresa Präauer

Just exactly where can we draw the line between human and animal, man and beast, and exactly how fuzzy (or furry?) is that line? How has our understanding of movement across that line changed over time? And what about those beings, those creatures that have been understood, or imagined to stand somewhere in between? These are the kinds of questions that Austrian writer and visual artist, Teresa Präauer, entertains in her charming, yet focused philosophical and cultural essay, Becoming Animal. The terrain she explores is one populated by a host of liminal creatures—hybrids, monsters, and chimeras— the sort of beings that have continued to inspire both our scientific and artistic imaginations from Antiquity through to the present.

Präauer begins with the harpy, one of the most distinctive figures to appear time and again in early efforts to catalogue all known living beings—factual, mythological, and “exotic” alike—that occupied artists and thinkers from the Medieval era on into the Age of Discovery.

In the Historia naturalis animalism, a seventeenth-century treatise on natural history by John Johnston, there is a bird-like creature with a human head. This ‘Harpyie’ or ‘Harpyia’ has a sceptical, not unfriendly face and long, flowing locks that are gently tucked behind one ear and extend halfway down her body—a bird’s body, of course—the plumage growing thicker and darker towards the back. Compact like a small chicken, the harpy sits atop a pair of enormous talons that could just as easily support a bird of prey.

It’s not her first appearance in natural histories, she has been depicted and evolving for a century. From our scientifically “sophisticated” vantage point today though, such a creature and many of her companions depicted in such volumes seem fanciful, but were they any more so than the angels and demons that also figured in many hierarchical systems? And early Modern scholars often had to work from accounts and drawings made by those with direct experience of the animals in question, as well as reports from travellers often carried second or third hand over time or distance, as they strived to catalogue and categorize all forms of life—mineral, vegetable, animal, and magical. Many of these life forms sat on the edge of classifiably, “pretty monsters” like the harpy and, as time went on and naturalists became more rigorous in their efforts, the fanciful creatures began to be weeded out, but others, like humans with hirsutism, found themselves defined as distinct from their hairless brethren, but like all humans, still very different from other primates. Yet, now, with the ability to study DNA, we know we share 99% of our genes with chimps and bonobos and suddenly the need to once again draw a clear boundary between ourselves and animals has become more important—and more difficult to maintain.

A relatively brief work, only 96 pages long, Becoming Animal is not a chronological survey of the development of taxonomical conventions—although Linnaeus makes more than one appearance—but rather a varied account that moves back and forth, from Michelangelo to contemporary literary theorists, from prehistoric cave paintings to “furries.” It is an engaging flow of ideas that pulls in scientific elements along with literary sources such as Ovid, Kafka, Nabokov, and Inger Christensen to explore the many facets of our connection with and within the natural world. It is the kind of entertaining exercise that can’t quite be pinned down, but Präauer’s primary interest ultimately lies in the space between human and animal, a space that can be approached from either direction. It is a space of movement. She notes that French theorists Deleuze and Guattari, when speaking of “becoming-animal,” perceived it as one of many forms of being, as a “demand for a mode of writing that moves within transitions and liminalities,” however:

Becoming is a verb, a doing that does not mean being. I write ‘becoming animal’ as two separate words, not joined by a hyphen. Animal is noun, and becoming is a verb. When I am becoming animal, I am not an animal. I am in transition. An animal that is becoming human is also in such a transition, albeit in a different way.

This thoughtful essay ends, as it opened, with the author observing the myriad forms of life visible from her window, leaving her reader with much to contemplate about this world in which we are just one element of a much larger whole.

Becoming Animal by Teresa Präauer is translated from the German by Kári Driscoll and published by Seagull Books.

I’m often out of step with the times: An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence by Dana Grigorcea

As if tugged by an invisible thread, I stroll the same old streets—under linden and chestnut trees, past potholes where water or fallen autumn leaves used to gather and kids used to splash and stomp around—breathing more deeply as I walk by the walls enclosing certain yards. Behind one I detect an elderberry bush, or maybe it’s jasmine, or even the more fragrant Japanese honeysuckle. I know there must be rusty garage door in the near courtyard, which will echo the sound of my heels and wake up the neighbour’s dog. And the small starlings lining the now-obsolete rooftop TV antennae will promptly chime in, too, right on cue.

After many years in Zurich, Victoria, the protagonist of Swiss-Romanian writer Dana Grigorcea’s novel An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence, has returned to her native Bucharest, a city now transformed from the Communist-era world in which she grew up into a place reshaped by post-revolutionary currents. It is a place she experienced in flux, as a member of the “so-called transitional generation,” but it has changed even more in her absence. She doesn’t tell us exactly why she has come back, but she is living in her family’s apartment and working at a bank. That is, until the bank is robbed by an old man with whom she will again cross paths as his geriatric crime spree continues. This unlikely occurrence not only knocks her off-kilter, but when her employer insists  she take leave to “process the trauma,” it opens up time and space for her to reconnect with the people and places of her past.

And so, in the stifling summer heat, trailed by the sticky scent of linden blossoms, Victoria fills her newly freed days wandering the city. Bucharest becomes a kind of post traumatic memory theatre with a personal grid superimposed on its layered historical structure. Street names are critical to her ability to orient herself, especially on those arteries that have been renamed, sometimes a number of times, as political currents have shifted. She regularly encounters people from her childhood and adolescence—school friends, former boyfriends, characters from her neighbourhood. Not exactly stream of consciousness, Victoria’s line of thought takes regular digressions as she sees or thinks of something or someone she once knew. Her new boyfriend Flavian will frequently try to navigate this altered landscape with her, offering a frame of reference wherever he can to the many changes that have occurred during her many years in Zurich. And her parents, who have also been living abroad, arrive to visit, further disturbing the unsettled dust of memory. She has an awkward lunch with her mother:

She picks up her knife and fork and continues eating, and I wonder if it would be better for us to talk about her life in the south of France but we tied that last time and it only made her sad. ‘We moved there too late, just too late.’ Or should I tell her about what’s going on here in Bucharest—about her dental practice which is going well? But she already knows. Once again, I refrain from asking her where she parked the car whose keys she’s  left with me, and what it looks like. I’d bet it’s a cream-coloured Peugeot, upholstered in cream-coloured leather. Some day I’ll come across it by accident while strolling about the neighbourhood. The door will pop right open for me, just like in Petre Ispirescu’s fairy tales of eternal youth and everlasting life, stories where the hero returns to his homeland after a long absence and finds that everything has changed, he doesn’t recognize a thing, and even starts to doubt whether he ever had any homeland at all.

As she traverses the city, Victoria notes the heavily weighted history of buildings, landmarks, public squares, and roadways. Her senses are on high alert, yet she is distracted by the smallest details, like the colour of nail polish she has chosen. And there is a constant, uneasy misfit between past and present that unnerves the narrative flow. Sometimes Victoria repeats herself, other times she falls into a side story about someone from her past that may or may not be fleshed out later, or seems to lose track of the thread of events that are—or appear to be—happening in the present. Sometimes the line between truth and illusion breaks down altogether like when a ride on the bus on the same route she used to take every day with her grandmother becomes a surreal, dystopian detour through a decaying urban landscape where cellphone service suddenly disappears and other passengers seem to morph into people Victoria thinks she recognizes.

Of course, she is a less than reliable narrator; her interpretation of reality and her emotional engagement is uncertain. Past lovers continually reappear, leading Flavian to ask “Are you waiting for a lover?” He eyes her with suspicion. “If so, I’ll stay by the door to catch him.” But through it all, Victoria remains an infectiously engaging story teller drawing on a wide range of characters and experiences. From the tale of a philandering neighbour murdered by his wife, to memories of her wildly eccentric grandmother, to details of unconventional tendencies of her parents and their friends, to an account of joining a crowd of thousands to catch a glimpse of Michael Jackson during his Dangerous tour in 1992, the Bucharest that she brings to life is the Ceausescu-era city she grew up in overlayed by a changed, modern metropolis that doesn’t exactly match at the seams. In these cracks she encounters people from her past, both in memory and  in real time. But then, what is real time when life has been disrupted by an unexpected event in a city that has itself been disrupted by more than one political upheaval?

An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence by Dana Grigorcea is translated from the German by Alta L. Price and published by Seagull Books.

2025 Wrap Up: Reading and other stuff

 

I don’t know what I expected when this year began. Ever since 2020 it seems we have greeted each year with some measure of optimism—I mean how could it be worse than the one that just passed? And somehow, each year has managed to be worse in some new, unanticipated way. 2025 saw the continuation of conflict, famine, destruction, climate catastrophes.  We also witnessed the further escalation of intolerance, racism, sexism, anti-trans sentiment, religious fundamentalism, and autocratic politics. Where I am in western Canada we have witnessed all of this, not just from our neighbours to the south, or distant nations, but right here close to home. It is hard not to lose hope, but giving up is not an option and so, 2026, here we come, preparing for the worst but dreaming of the best.

Personally, I struggled a bit this year. Family stuff, some depression, and, in late November, a car accident that has left me with stiffness and pain that is slow to subside. But, on the bright(er) side, my focus and concentration has returned, and replacing my damaged car proved easier than it might have been. My old Honda Fit had more value than I expected, and I happened to see a (newer) used vehicle that fit my needs for a very good price and was fortunately in the position to buy it. If the police manage to find the impaired driver who hit me (assuming she was insured) I will even get my deductible back. But, quite honestly, I’ll be happy to be able to look over my left shoulder again!

As for reading/reviewing, 2025 was a mixed year. I had a few off times when I struggled to finish books (or gave up altogether), and a number of mediocre reads passed without public mention. At the same time, I read some excellent poetry in English, but could not find the words to write coherent reviews. For some reason, I feel I lack the knowledge and vocabulary to say the “right” thing about poetry in my own language—I feel more comfortable responding to translations. And I did read a lot of poetry in translation this year.

Looking back over 2025, the singular defining force for me was the work of Danish experimental poet and writer Inger Christensen (1935–2009). In January I read her essay collection  The Condition of Secrecy, and I was immediately entranced by her love of language and her view of the world as informed by science, nature, music, and mathematics. I knew I wanted to read all of her poetry and fiction and, throughout the year, that is exactly what I did. I read eight of her translated works and only have one left to obtain although I have a dual language edition of one of the sequences in that volume (“Butterfly Valley”). Along the way I also decided I wanted to learn to read Danish as there are elements of her work that simply cannot be reproduced in translation (mathematical constraints in particular).

And so, I am learning Danish, or, should I say, jeg lærer dansk.

Although I enjoyed all of her books, my favourite piece of fiction was the crazy word play mystery Azorno (1967) and my favourite work of poetry was her monumental it/det (1969), both earlier works. Of course, the wonderful book length poem alphabet (1981) is also amazing. Her poetry and essays are translated by Susanna Nied, her fiction by Denise Newman.

Some thoughts about a few of my other favourite reads from the past year:

 Prose:

Ceilings – Zuzana Brabcová (translated from the Czech by Tereza Veverka Novická)

Set on the detox ward of a psychiatric hospital in Prague, Brabcová captures the institutional environment and the strangeness of psychotic interludes with the skill only personal experience can provide. This wild and delirious ride pulled me out of a reading slump.

Dreaming of Dead People – Rosalind Belben

I read two novels by Rosalind Belben this year, The Limit which was re-issued by NYRB Classics several years ago and this one which was re-issued by And Other Stories this year. Both are strange in a brutal yet beautiful way, but Dreaming is, to me, a more accomplished, in depth novel.

Love Letter in Cuneiform – Tomáš Zmeškal (translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker)

One of those books I’ve been meaning to read for years and when I finally picked it up off the shelf, I was delighted to find out how funny and weird this multi-generational family drama truly is. Zmeškal lends magical realism and historical reality with a cast of eccentric characters to create a memorable tale.

Self-Portrait in the Studio – Giorgio  Agamben (translated from the Italian by Kevin Attell)

Far from a conventional memoir, Agamben invites his reader on a tour of the various studios he has occupied over the years, reflecting on the people, books, and places that come to mind along the way. A surprisingly engaging work.

The Dissenters – Youssef Rakha

The final two novels on my list are both highly inventive in style and form. Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha’s first novel written in English manages to seamlessly incorporate Arabic expressions without explanation, adding to the richness of this original, multi-dimensional story of one remarkable woman set against the events of recent Egyptian history. Endlessly rewarding.

Nevermore – Cécile Wajsbrot (translated from the French by Tess Lewis)

This ambitious novel is a moving evocation of loss and change. A translator has come to Dresden to work on a translation of the central “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse from English into French. Reflections on change and transformation drawn from her own state in life and various historical events accompany the process of translation.

Poetry:

Of Desire and Decarceration – Charline Lambert (translated from the French by John Taylor)

It is most unusual for a poet as young as Lambert (b. 1989) to see her first four volumes of poetry published together so early in her career, but translator John Taylor felt that the Belgian poet’s books show a natural growth best appreciated as a whole. He is not wrong (he is also a translator whose judgement I always trust).

Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005–2022 – Durs Grünbein (translated from the German by Karen Leeder)

This selection of poetry rightfully won the Griffin Prize this past year. Grünbein’s work tends to draw on his hometown of Dresden and Italy where he now spends much time, and this selection presents a good introduction to the variety of his mid-career work. One can only hope that the attention he has received with this book will lead to full translations of more of his work.

arabic, between love and war – Norah Alkharrashi and Yasmine Haj (eds)

The first of a new translation series by Toronto-based trace press, this selection of original poems with their translations—most written in Arabic, with some written in English and translated into Arabic, exists as a kind of conversation between poets from across the Arabic speaking world and its diaspora. Vital work.

The Minotaur’s Daughter – Eva Luka (translated from the Slovak by James Sutherland-Smith)

This book, a complete surprise tucked into a package from Seagull Books, is a delight. Luka’s world is a strange and quirky one, transgressive and fantastic. Leonora Carrington is a huge influence, with a number of  ekphrastic poems inspired by her paintings but given life from Luka’s own unique angle. Loved it!

Ancient Algorithms – Katrine Øgaard Jensen (with Ursula Andkjær Olsen and others)

This is the book that marked my return to reading post-accident. And how could it not. Jensen’s translations of Olsen’s poetic trilogy are very close to my heart. This unique work begins with poems selected from those books (in the original Danish), followed by Jensen’s translations, which set the stage for a series of collaborative mistranslations guided by rules set by the various poet translators involved. A wonderful celebration of poetry and translation and the necessary bond between the two.

My Heresies – Alina Stefanescu

Finally, one of the English language poetry collections I read and did not review (I did have a great title though). Alina Stefanescu breathes poetry as a matter of course, as is clear to anyone who has had an opportunity to engage with her online. There is an infectious defiance to this collection which straddles Romania and America, conjures angels and demons, and explores the everyday reality of romantic and parental love. I connected most directly with wry observations of motherhood that resonated with my own less than conventional parental existence.

There are, as ever, many other books I read this year that could have made this year end review. You’ll have to check my blog to find them!

Happy new year!

War is back again: War Primer by Alexander Kluge

When I was a pupil, we learnt to read and write with a primer. When war breaks out, Bertolt Brecht said, we have to learn to read and write again.

These words, which come from the acknowledgement at the close of Alexander Kluge’s War Primer, reference both the primer as a short introductory book on a subject or informative piece of writing, and Brecht’s famous War Primer, a series of short poems written in response to images the poet collected while exiled from Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Kluge’s own experience of the war, especially the allied bombing of his hometown of Halberstadt when he was thirteen,  has had a significant influence on his long career as a writer, philosopher, and filmmaker. And again it appears here in this slender volume, but the instigation for this work is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022—the return of full scale war to Europe. However, his multi-faceted look at  our stubborn propensity for conflict across the western world, is both wide and immediate, and conveyed via brief historical accounts, anecdotes, short stories, and imagined conversations, interspersed with images and film clips.

The book opens with a personal series of reflections. He thinks of his mother, born in 1908, considers how little he and his fellow students understood of the dangers mounting in late 1944, and recalls the last few months of the war and the burning of his hometown on April 8, 1945 (a subject to which he has devoted an entire book). As a boy whose sense of war was much coloured by the exploits of his tin soldiers on imaginary grounds, he could only have a thirteen year-old’s understanding of what the troops he was observing on those final days meant. From today’s perspective—in the case of this volume, his ninety-first birthday in February of 2023—his knowledge is much deeper, broader, and no less troubled.

Although some of the textual and visual material directly references the current conflict in Ukraine, the overall effect here is to create a mosaic of contextual commentary and musings about the nature of war, the military mindset, and the inevitable, often deadly, dance of diplomacy. Kluge’s short pieces approach moments or aspects of the First and Second World Wars, the US Civil War, the invasion of Iraq, and more. He examines the idea and illusions of armour from different angles, zeroes in on specific battles, and dramatizes often hapless discussions about the dynamics of power and peace. This is not a detailed exegesis, it is rather a collection of vignettes. Kluge’s characteristic approach to fiction that holds close to the borders of nonfiction, allows him to incorporate voices from the past in first person or dialogue. Yet, there are no solutions. As we continue to see, war is endlessly reinventing itself, and its small moments of hope always cling to a thread:

TWO SIDES TO A HAPPY ENDING

In the early days of the Ukrainian war, there was a report of a certain number of villagers, including young people and children, holding up a Russian tank. After a period of hesitation, the tank driver put it in reverse and rolled back out of the village.

This is an urban legend. It was already making the rounds during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. During the 1991 coup in Moscow, the scene actually occurred several times and led to several tank divisions withdrawing from the city. In Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, however, the same kind of confrontation ended in a massacre.

The report in the case of Ukraine emphasized the bravery of the civilians who opposed the tank. But it takes two to tango, as it were, for an encounter to end happily: the determination of the residents, but also that of the young tank driver, perhaps all of 18, who put the tank in reverse.

The images that illustrate this book come primarily from Kluge’s original film montages, along with a few documentary photographs. QR codes link out to cinematic material of varying lengths, typically triptychs of these same images shifting against musical scores, but other material as well. Most are very short and worth viewing. Taken together, text, image, and sound make this very much is a primer for the twenty-first century. One that, sadly, seems to be still be a necessary resource.

War Primer by Alexander Kluge is translated from the German by Alexander Booth and published by Seagull Books.

That day was a little bit odd: The Minotaur’s Daughter: Selected Poems by Eva Luka

That day was a little bit odd. After walking down the street
.       I stopped in a movement,
at one particular moment of growing older.
And I sensed it (the moment of growing older) like a scientist
.      over a microscope:
the precise split-second border between the former and the
.       future me.
In that borderline, tangible second, I was nothing; only an echo
of a former self and the germ of the future, the old me.

It lasted for only that one moment. Then the air rustled like
.      golden hay
and into the street a horse came.

(from “A Horse Came Into Our Street”)

Odd is one way to describe the poetry of Slovakian poet Eva Luka—deliciously, devilishly, delightfully odd. Her poems open up strange, shimmering vistas filled with fantastic imagery. Born Eva Lukáčová  in Trnava, Slovakia, in 1965, she studied English and Japanese, first in Slovakia and later in Japan. She began publishing poetry under her given name, first in anthologies and then, in 1999, with her first collection Divosestra (Wildsister).  For her second book, Diabloň (Deviltree), published in 2005, she adopted her nom de plume, along with what would become her practice of selecting a poem from each collection to provide the title for the work to follow. In this way, her poems speak to one another within and across collections which also include Havranjel (Ravenangel, 2011) and Jazver (I-Beast, 2019).

With The Minotaur’s Daughter, translated by James Sutherland-Smith, a selection of poetry drawn from her work to date, is now available in English for the first time. In his Afterword, Sutherland-Smith suggests that Lukáčová  may be one of the last great poets of resistance in Europe, citing her:

resistance to conform artistically and [a] resilience against the potential psychological pressures resulting from the circumstances of her life and times. Eva’s resistance to conform to being categorized within a specific poetic movement—particularly those associated with a single gender—reflects the individual nature of her work, and this artistic independence even challenges gender identity in the personae that inhabit her poems.

A transgressive spirit illuminates her poetry, extending beyond matters of gender, to explore questions of personal freedom, sexuality, and desire within a phantasmagorical landscape featuring eccentric figures, mythical creatures, and fabulous flora and fauna. She creates, with her poems, haunting, often dark, scenes or vignettes that can be as intriguing as they are disarming.

Unlike many similar selections that draw from across a poet’s oeuvre, the fifty-nine poems that comprise The Minotaur’s Daughter are not presented chronologically, or divided according to the individual volumes they come from. Rather, the assortment seems to be loosely thematic, with many of the earlier poems coming from more recent collections, and some of the Japanese inspired work from her first book coming later. And, because she sometimes writes companion pieces that appear one or two volumes apart—for example, “Wildsister,” the title poem from her first book, is later answered with “Wildbrother” in her third—here they are presented together. The impact is more powerful this way. It is also evident that Luka appreciates the poetic storytelling potential of triptychs and series, something that may have developed over time, as Sutherland-Smith seems to think that her upcoming fifth collection may include even more.

One of the most developed sequences in this selection begins with an ekphrastic poem inspired by Leonora Carrington’s painting  Portrait of the Late Mrs Partridge. In this piece, the speaker is the artist commissioned to capture the likeness of the wild-haired woman in her odd partridge skirt. He then becomes famous, but is ever haunted by the painting. Four more “Late Mrs Partridge” poems follow, addressing her body, her death, her husband, and finally her wake. Mrs Partridge herself voices all but her husband’s lament from beyond this life, even returning to her own wake, still nursing an internal flame, to drink a toast with the bereaved:

A man sits at the top table, his face,
wrinkled from the tertiary era, with an incalculable expression.
The atmosphere is gloomy, but still audible
is a ubiquitous slurping, gurgling and belching,
as if the whispered stories haven’t had as much power
as unstoppable bodily hunger and thirst.

Leonora Carrington’s eerie, fantastic paintings appear again as the stimulus for five other poems in this translation (not to mention the poet’s own artwork which graces the cover). At times, Luka stands as an observer, as in “And Then They Saw the Minotaur’s Daughter”  where she watches  the “two well-behaved boys—somewhere between childhood and doubt” watching the noble horned woman-creature while spirit-like forms fill the room, Elsewhere she animates and engages directly with the scene, even imagining the central figure outside their fixed setting as in the Mrs Partridge quintet and  “Necromancer,”  a poem after the abstracted, surreal painting of the same name.

The images that dominate Luka’s poetry are drawn from nature—water, flowers, birds, reptiles, and animals—but, as with her human beings, the line between the real and the spiritual is fluid. They inhabit a shifting borderland and there is a pagan, pantheistic sensibility at play. Her animals inspire awe and fear, mythological figures speak, and a woman invites an angelic black bird (Ravenangel) into her bed in a dark sequence of desire, longing, and loss. Hers is a magical world, albeit one that accepts that mystery can be tinged with heaviness and pain. But it is not a relentlessly dark place; rather it exists in a kind of intermediate, and yet, ultimately familiar, space:

It’s incomprehensible, that border of yours
between the feverish night and the healing morning; as if you
.       didn’t recognize
the differences between frenzied hyacinths and tamed hyenas.
.       What you tell me
in the evening, no longer applies in the morning, and vice versa

(from “You and Me When the Cock Crows”)

One might describe the poetry of Eva Luka as akin to richly woven tapestries; the vignettes she crafts are vivid, often disturbing, but they tend to close with a note of promise, that is, with a measure of the resilience that characterizes her work. This quality is evident in The Minotaur’s Daughter. Her striking imagery is well captured in Sutherland-Smith’s translations, while his decision to break with the typical chronological ordering of a “selected poems” collection offers her first English language readers a deeply rewarding introduction to her singular poetic universe.

The Minotaur’s Daughter: Selected Poems by Eva Luka is translated from the Slovak by James Sutherland-Smith and published by Seagull Books.