Days of Grace
Doris Kareva is one of Estonia's leading poets, admired especially for poems that balance precision and control with passion and bravado. Her achievement, according to Estonian Literature, is in writing poems which are both ‘plentiful and fragile like a crystal...balancing on the line between the human soul and the universe, between sound and silence'. Days of Grace spans over forty years of her poetic output, showing how the sustained depth and clarity of her poetry lies in her ability to create ambiguity and suggest harmony at the same time, with a multiplicity of meanings generating the opposite of clarity: a form of hinting which at its most illuminating becomes utterly oracle-like. Such is the metaphysical sensitivity of her poetry that its moral charge is sensed almost physically. She has also been called ‘a priestess of love' who is fearless as well as discreet in her portrayal of love that is so ‘pure and elevating like mountain air' that she seems to be writing from another time or dimension.
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Days of Grace
Doris Kareva is one of Estonia's leading poets, admired especially for poems that balance precision and control with passion and bravado. Her achievement, according to Estonian Literature, is in writing poems which are both ‘plentiful and fragile like a crystal...balancing on the line between the human soul and the universe, between sound and silence'. Days of Grace spans over forty years of her poetic output, showing how the sustained depth and clarity of her poetry lies in her ability to create ambiguity and suggest harmony at the same time, with a multiplicity of meanings generating the opposite of clarity: a form of hinting which at its most illuminating becomes utterly oracle-like. Such is the metaphysical sensitivity of her poetry that its moral charge is sensed almost physically. She has also been called ‘a priestess of love' who is fearless as well as discreet in her portrayal of love that is so ‘pure and elevating like mountain air' that she seems to be writing from another time or dimension.
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Overview

Doris Kareva is one of Estonia's leading poets, admired especially for poems that balance precision and control with passion and bravado. Her achievement, according to Estonian Literature, is in writing poems which are both ‘plentiful and fragile like a crystal...balancing on the line between the human soul and the universe, between sound and silence'. Days of Grace spans over forty years of her poetic output, showing how the sustained depth and clarity of her poetry lies in her ability to create ambiguity and suggest harmony at the same time, with a multiplicity of meanings generating the opposite of clarity: a form of hinting which at its most illuminating becomes utterly oracle-like. Such is the metaphysical sensitivity of her poetry that its moral charge is sensed almost physically. She has also been called ‘a priestess of love' who is fearless as well as discreet in her portrayal of love that is so ‘pure and elevating like mountain air' that she seems to be writing from another time or dimension.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781780371597
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication date: 04/26/2018
Pages: 128
Sales rank: 1,077,026
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Doris Kareva is one of Estonia's leading poets. She was born in Tallinn in 1958, daughter of the composer Hillar Kareva, and published her first poems at the age of 14. In 1977 she entered the University of Tartu as an already acknowledged young poet. Due to her dissident connections she was expelled but graduated as a distance student in Romance and Germanic philology. She has worked for the cultural weekly Sirp (Sickle) and as the Secretary-General of the Estonian National Commission for UNESCO from 1992 to 2008, and is currently an editor for the literary journal Looming (Creation). Following the restoration of Estonian independence, Kareva's collection In Place of the World received the national cultural prize in 1993. She used the prize money to set up the ‘Straw Stipend' for the publication of debut collections, to support emerging talent in unsettled times. Kareva has published 15 collections of poetry, a collection of essays and a work of prose. She has also translated poetry (Anna Akhmatova, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Kabir, Rumi) and plays, essays and prose (W.H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Brodsky, Kahlil Gibran, Shakespeare). She has compiled anthologies, written texts for music and theatre, and given lectures on culture, education and ethics in Estonia and abroad. Her poetry has been translated into over 20 languages and has inspired composers and directors in Estonia and abroad - sounding equally fitting at a punk concert and the funeral ceremony of a president, in a Warner Classics studio and at the Estonian Song Festival. Kareva has been honoured with two national cultural prizes and four literary prizes; in 2001 she was awarded the Estonian Order of the White Star. She has two books of poetry in English translation, Shape of Time, translated by Tiina Aleman (Arc Publications, 2010), and Days of Grace: Selected Poems, translated by Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov (Bloodaxe Books, 2018).

Table of Contents

Foreword Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov 11

Pass Of Silence

The Calling 15

'Every day…' 16

'If you speak only once…' 17

'If I do not speak of this…' 18

'Don't call. Don't ask…' 19

'In a nightlit room the air blooms…' 20

'A paw extends in the dark…' 21

'My hair grows up through the ceiling…' 22

'I call you and I sense that you call me…' 23

'No, this light will not fade…' 24

'Through life flies a stone of death…' 25

'Life has no story…' 26

'When I write…' 27

'The future is going on now…' 28

'Something exploded: was it a bomb…' 29

'To breathe out…' 30

'The world is the answer…' 31

'God occurs…' 32

'What is man…' 33

'Pure goodness burns like acid…' 34

'You shall not…' 35

'Middle-aged and overweight…' 36

'Three in the cave…' 37

'When the fear of death looms large…' 38

'Grey matter and dark matter…' 39

'You are no better than anyone…' 40

'On behalf of all…' 41

'I sing in praise of the loser…' 42

'When no matter how you ask…' 43

'Nothing else have I asked, nor will I…' 44

'All you need will come your way…' 45

'Nothing is happening. Just stars circling…' 46

'To live more clearly…' 48

'My load I now give away… 49

Clouds' Letter to the Sand

'Observing the rainbowing world…' 53

'Go on then, sun…' 54

'A house by the sea…' 55

'All that is is utterable…' 56

'Stark and scant is the nordic light…' 57

'Tomorrow is the light of all…' 58

'I lingered long by the sea…' 59

'The vivid display of life flows on…' 60

'Clouds' letter to the sand…' 61

'Who lives in light never wanes…' 62

The scalpel and the metronome…' 63

'Chant the mantra, mandragora…' 64

'Love treads a quicksilver path…' 65

'You ceased to be a miracle…' 66

'To make a human life visible…' 67

'Bird spell opens the bashful bloom, of day…' 68

'With a feather in the sand, a flowering branch in the air…' 69

'I am your land…' 70

'Days dissolve like sugar lumps…' 71

'No will to do aught…' 72

'The gentlest m you is sheltered in me…' 73

'You open me up like a tome treasured…' 74

'And I love you…' 75

'And the bells tolled; July's glory…' 76

'If autumn is endured…' 77

The Visitor 78

No other or better world will come…' 79

'In the house I was passing a phone rang…' 80

'Wherever I set foot, you…' 81

'What is not and yet is…' 82

'Life will become eternity…' 83

'A ship with hoisted sails…' 84

'Light, light is the ship that ferries…' 85

Leeward Into The Light

'I dreamt about the world…' 89

'I had a dream that Satan spoke…' 91

'Shadow-like you move among the shades…' 92

'I slept the sleep of minerals…' 93

'The world as pleasure and pain…' 94

'Stay uncut crystal…' 95

'Two…' 96

'Through the mist-dark park…' 97

'Life and dream - leaves…' 98

'I went to visit the world…' 99

'The world slips the mind, mutates and melts…' 100

'Now it has come; what you call autumn…' 101

'All seems so clear in September…' 102

The husk of home houses two worlds…' 103

'Rain, are you still rain…' 104

'Snow is a blank sheet…' 105

'Dauntless, defenceless…' 106

'Do not fear, do not worry…' 107

'She never thinks about money…' 108

'Some words are precious as stones…' 109

'If you long for the sea…' 110

'I watch my hand in the flowing water…' 111

'Whatever you get…' 112

'Stepping out of the church porch…' 113

'Between the dead and the living…' 114

'A stairway, a sky snail-shell…' 115

Lesson in Harmony 119

Biographical Notes 125

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