Living the Loss

Grief runs through these poems, most beginning with an epigraph from a diary entry by Emily Bront, whose first loss was her mother when she was just three years old. We are in an interior world in this sequence, thoughts and feelings pouring through these elegant poems, but always anchored in the body, in the physical. Its in the daily round of kneading the bread that anger is transferred from body to dough till both are transformed; its in the intricate feathery leaflets/sweet chrysanthemum-like scent of yarrow that refuge is experienced; its in the imagination of an islands sun that dark thoughts (a crepe-winged crow) find respite. The poems move between the quiet daily life of a woman who loses those she loves over and over again and Emily Bront as an extraordinary writer. And in that movement, emotions so earth-shattering, so veined with yearning, so unspeakable in their grief that they challenge death itself, find their form. Liliana Pasterska brings to life a soaring spirit in lucid images that leave us in awe.