An A5 pamphlet in Russian (Macedonian?), Italian and English, available from Liberodiscrivere. I think the originals are in English, though it's not clear.
I often don't understand the imagery, or the reason for the choice of words. It's a style of surrealism that's never appealed to me, but I've other difficulties too. Here are some examples from the first 3 pages -
- "Why didn't I bottle it and throw it at the sea/ to recover it from a lighthouse distance?" (p.33) - at the sea? lighthouse distance? What does it mean overall?
- "the tomatoes on the vine reflect their barbed wire/ through the glass" (p.33) - I can see how vines can look like barbed wire, but have trouble with the idea of reflecting through glass.
- "red metronome-shoes" (p.34) - red dancing shoes whose heels are together while the toe ends are swung together then apart? So?
- "I feel the lightness of your reproach/ in my room as water in a vase - its sharp edges" (p.34)
- "quasi-antique shop" (p.35)
- "Heavy, like the ash folklore at the lid's edges" (p.35)
- "Charlie props Grandpa's feet and pushes him/ through the openings of the vintage radio speaker" (p.35) - Charlie is presumably the Sir Charles Spencer who appeared from nowhere in the previous stanza. Why? What does "props" mean?
The next poem, "A Leftish Union of Dolls in the System of Paediatric Anatomy" begins with
|
The dolls in my father's house are dead ends: their throats where ants are strings of praying pilgrims. |
which is enough to make me turn to the next poem.
There are snippets that could I can make more sense of - "She doesn't know why the old are silent in church/ and pray out loud by their beds./ At daytime she wanders the streets/ feeding lost travellers// watching train toys on windowsills" (p.43); "in the gusts of wind no one is safe/ but the nights keep moving as if nothing is a secret" (p.46), etc - but seeking them out wasn't worth the effort.
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