Book description
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,…
Why read it?
1 author picked Days of Grace as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Doris Kareva (born 1958) is an outstanding poet from the small but powerful Estonian literary community.
Like any outstanding poet, she often does things that work in the original language, but these translations by Irish poet Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov really capture the music, the beats of short lines that accumulate into vivid and rhythmic pictures.
(Plus, how cool is it to have a translator named Ksenofontov? I envy both author and translator, and it turns out that Kareva also translates her translator’s poetry into Estonian.)
From Sibelan's list on The best books of poetry from Eastern Europe in translation.
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