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.
| 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 rehandling of meditation |
Shearsman Books Crookedness, paperback/tsvetanka elenkova
