Tsvetanka Elenkova / Jonathan Dunne
Librería Samer Atenea
Librería Aciertas (Toledo)
Kálamo Books
Librería Perelló (Valencia)
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Donde los libros
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
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
