Crookedness

by Tsvetanka Elenkova

Overview

The world according to Tsvetanka Elenkova is both lucid and hieratic. In it, a lover's eye is 'a disc on a chain /with the god of the sun /the window casts on the wall'; but love itself is an 'Altar' on which the lovers are 'lying crosswise'. The poet's own narrative eye keeps shifting viewpoint - and perspective - not for the sake of it but to create depth and meaning: 'The other side of perspective /is dimension'. It's all expressed with economy and the utmost clarity: yet that clarity is deceptive. These poems, too, depend on your point of view: 'Reflection is capture' indeed, and reflection may be not only the untroubled mirror image, but the pause and re-handling of meditation.

Another way to say all this is that Elenkova is a religious mystic; [...] She lives in the world of cars, mobile phones and city parks, and has an imagination stuffed with cultural riches, [...b]ut she also lives in a poetic world [...] of religious mystery, mortality, love and desire. This mystical verse dives repeatedly into the given, and discovers there a world of symbol and - perhaps above all - movement. It is not Gerard Manley Hopkins's search for 'inscape', but instead an apprehension that from moment to moment forms itself into symbolic codes - and then releases those codes into the material, sensual world. --Fiona Sampson

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781893670952
Publisher:	Tebot Bach
Publication date:	03/21/2013
Series:	New World Translation
Pages:	58
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Tsvetanka Elenkova has published six poetry books and two books of essays (one on the Balkans and another on Bulgarian frescos). Crookedness is her fourth poetry collection and has also appeared in a French edition, as Distortions. Her previous collection, The Seventh Gesture, has appeared in English with Shearsman Books, in French and Serbian. Individual poems have been translated into fifteen languages and have appeared in the magazines Modern Poetry in Translation, Poem, Poetry Review and The Massachusetts Review among others. She has been a guest at various festivals including Lodève, Struga, Tinos and Vilenica and recently received the prestigious literary award Pencho's Oak for the body of her work. She is the editor of At the End of the World: Contemporary Poetry from Bulgaria (Shearsman Books, 2012) and has translated international authors such as Raymond Carver, Rosalía de Castro, Bogomil Gjuzel, Manuel Rivas, Fiona Sampson and the bhakti poets in Speaking of Siva into her native Bulgarian. She is a doctoral student in theology at Sofia University, where she is writing a thesis on mysticism in the poetry of Gregory of Nazianzus.

Jonathan Dunne holds a degree in Classics from Oxford University and has translated more than fifty books from the Bulgarian, Catalan, Galician and Spanish languages for New Directions, Penguin Random House, Shearsman Books and others. He has written three books about the English language, the latest of which is Stones Of Ithaca (2019) about meaning inside words and the language of the environment. He is currently studying for a Certificate in Orthodox Christian Studies in Cam-bridge and serves as a subdeacon in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. He directs the publishing house Small Stations Press. His personal website is www.stonesofithaca.com.