CROOKEDNESS IBD

Sinopse

The world according to Tsvetanka Elenkova is both lucid and hieratic. In it, a lover&rsquo,s eye is &lsquo,a disc on a chain /with the god of the sun /the window casts on the wall&rsquo,, but love itself is an &lsquo,Altar&rsquo, on which the lovers are &lsquo,lying crosswise&rsquo,. The poet&rsquo,s own narrative eye keeps shifting viewpoint &ndash, and perspective &ndash, not for the sake of it but to create depth and meaning: &lsquo,The other side of perspective /is dimension&rsquo,. It&rsquo,s all expressed with economy and the utmost clarity: yet that clarity is deceptive. These poems, too, depend on your point of view: &lsquo,Reflection is capture&rsquo, indeed, and reflection may be not only the untroubled mirror image, but the pause and re-handling of meditation.áá á á Another way to say all this is that Elenkova is a religious mystic, [&hellip,] She lives in the world of cars, mobile phones and city parks, and has an imagination stuffed with cultural riches, [&hellip,b]ut she also lives in a poetic world [&hellip,] of religious mystery, mortality, love and desire. This mystical verse dives repeatedly into the given, and discovers there a world of symbol and &ndash, perhaps above all &ndash, movement. It is not Gerard Manley Hopkins&rsquo,s search for &lsquo,inscape&rsquo,, but instead an apprehension that from moment to moment forms itself into symbolic codes &ndash, and then releases those codes into the material, sensual world. á&mdash,Fiona Sampson