Shape of Time

Doris Kareva is one of Estonia's leading poets, and 'Shape of Time' is her eleventh book of poetry and her first full collection to be published in the UK. The poet suggests that it is composed like a piece of music in three 'movements'. The first, 'After the World', presents, as its central theme, a post-apocalyptic picture of despair; the second, 'Deo et Die', develops - by drawing on the beauty of nature and language - a measured message of hope; and the third, 'Shape of Time', through a process of re-evaluation and reconstruction, consolidates a new order. A short fourth part, 'Zero Point Reflection' by way of a finale, reflects on what has gone before from a slightly different perspective which serves to underline the ambiguities and uncertainties of the poet's journey through time. Doris Kareva observes the anguish of existence and experience in a style that is pared-back, bone-clean, needle-sharp. Her work has indeed the notation of the music of inwardness, of its despairs and its mediating flashes of illumination. And thus her poetry has its being in a time and place where past, present and future exist simultaneously.A " Penelope Shuttle, from her Introduction to 'Shape of Time'