The Shape of Time

The Shape of Time is Doris Kareva's eleventh collection and, as with all her books, its publication was hailed as a major literary event in Estonia. In style, it is more restrained than her earlier collections but its themes are the same – love and its great enemies, death and time – and the poems still retain the romantic bravado and recklessness that make her work so compelling. "This minutely sculpted, effortlessly elegant, and endlessly expansive collection is further evidence of an important poet at the height of her powers." Acumen "It is a work of pure lyricism that in a sense seems almost wholly rooted in personal feeling and experience. Some poems seem to have arisen almost immediately from specific occasions, if only through their flaring intensity; others to be a coming to terms with experience after time has passed... Many of the poems grow out of different kinds of pain such as the thwarting or loss of love, the attrition of time, or the anguish of an existence that seems meaningless, but the overall impact is exhilarating. Sometimes this is simply because the swiftness, energy and beauty of the poems themselves seem to reflect a resilience and generosity of spirit, a kind of implicit reaching out to embrace whatever life offers." Edmund Prestwich "This is difficult, engaged writing, about the ambiguities and uncertainties of the journey through time; adventurous in both theme and treatment, it will not please every reader. But it will certainly challenge." Envoi Doris Kareva is arguably Estonia's leading female poet. Born in Tallinn in 1958, she studied English Language and Literature at Tartu University and worked in the cultural weekly Sirp from 1978 to 1993 and from 1997 to 2002. From 1992 onwards, she has been the Secretary General of the Estonian National Commission for UNESCO in Estonia. She has published one book of essays and 14 collections of poetry which have been translated into over 20 languages.

Table of Contents:
Translator's Preface Introduction I AFTER THE WORLD The dog with a third eye - A" / The clock moves - A" / The scalpel - A" / Man - A" / Whatever you need - A" / The days melt - A" / Within three seconds - A" / When the fear - A" / Daughter of chaos - A" / Yes we did sleep - A" / He hated himself - A" / Faithful? - A" / Grammar of pain - A" / My metaphysics - A" / I live in spring - A" / The heart writes - A" / Moving through - A" / All lines - A" / The meaning - A" / No way will it heal - A" / When I threw you out - A" / I don't carry your picture - A" / Everything I shouldn't think - A" / I saw you - A" / I am rehearsing - A" / Middle-aged - A" / As a child I wondered - A" / There are three in the cave - A" II DEO ET DIE In the end, hope - A" / All the fuses were blown - A" / Emptiness - A" / From what material - A" / The suit of light - A" / Countless and wonderful - A" / Poetry is the dance - A" / He who lives in light - A" / When a wave splashes - A" / Whoever has learned - A" / Exhaustion's divine enervation! - A" / You aren't better than anyone - A" / The question isn't - A" / Idleness is often empowering - A" / Man is still asleep - A" / Delicious, singular - A" Vota mind vahel kui voileiba - A" / Have me like a sandwich - A" / Your most delicate detail - A" / In the depths of August's dark nights - A" / Like a cornucopia - A" / All bodies - A" / We cap the night - A" / Day, day - A" / Tomorrow is everyone's light - A" III AJA KUJU / SHAPE OF TIME The falling stars - A" / A seaside house - A" / Lift up, then, sun - A" / One night - A" / Blazing, unmoving sun - A" / Desert dogs run - A" / Golden black feathery tail - A" / That which is - A" / I listen for hours - A" / I walked along the sea-shore - A" / Life's living expression - A" / In what language - A" / To live - A" / You inhale - A" / The reader - A" / The sparks - A" / Beneath the full moon - A" / The Swordfish - A" / The best part of day - A" / All of a sudden - A" / The nights write - A" / The three-sided glass house - A" / All those delicate - A" / Bitter and scarce - A" / Everything spins - A" / Our destiny - A" / Like a bald man - A" / Life teaches one thing - A" / Whoever has even once - A" / Language flows - A" / Language is truly - A" / With clocklike precision - A" / I don't know - A" / A butterfly - A" / Yesterday my mind - A" / The world diverges - A" / It seems - A" / The morning unfurls - A" / Blindingly - A" IV NULLPUNKTI PEEGELDUS / ZERO POINT REFLECTION Zero Point Reflection / Shape of Time / Deo et Die Biographical Notes

About the Author :
DORIS KAREVA (author) was born in 1958 and graduated, cum laude, in Roman-Germanic philology from Tartu University in 1983. From 1978-1993, and from 1997-2002, she worked for the cultural weekly 'Sirp'. From 1992-2008 she was the Secretary-General of the Estonian National Commission for UNESCO in Estonia, and from 2009 Chief Editor of the family journal 'Meie Pere'. Since 1978, Doris Kareva has published fourteen collections of poetry and one collection of essays. Her poems have been set to music in Dutch, Greek, Swedish, Belgian and English. Canadian and German choreographers have set her poetry to dance. The City Theatre in Tallinn has performed her poetry for a few seasons and in Thailand her texts were performed at the Bangkok Royal Opera Theatre. Her poetry has been translated into more than twenty languages including Greek, Thai, Hindi and Hebrew. She is also a highly-regarded translator and has translated the works of many authors into Estonian, including the poetry of Akhmatova, Dickinson, Gibran and Kabir, essays by Brodsky and Auden, and plays by Beckett, Brodsky and Shakespeare. She has also compiled and translated a collection of Irish contemporary poetry. Kareva is frequently asked to give poetry readings and talks about Estonian literature and culture, both at home and abroad. She has selected and edited numerous literary anthologies, contributed articles to literary journals, and written intro-ductions to books by other authors. In autumn 2006, she participated in the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa. She is the recipient of many literary prizes and awards. Doris Kareva has worked as a stipendiate in United States, Sweden, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Flanders and Italy, and has given readings of her work throughout Europe, Scandinavia, the United States and the Far East. TIINA ALEMAN (translator) is a poet, translator, and editor. She was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1958. Her mother's family emigrated to the United States from Estonia after the Second World War and her father was born in Panama. An only child, she grew up with her maternal grandparents on a farm in upstate New York and as a result, Estonian was her first language. Since the mid-1980s, she has been a frequent visitor to Estonia. She has participated in poetry readings and performance art projects in a variety of venues in the New York City area and in 2009, a selection of her poetry was published in 'Mosaic'. Doris Kareva's translations of her poetry have been published in Estonia. Tiina Aleman has translated three volumes of Kareva's poetry, as well as an essay and a number of individual poems, some of which have appeared in 'The Iowa Review', 'Dragonfire', 'Words without Borders' and 'ELM'. Since 2008, she has been working with the Berlin-based Estonian composer, Juri Reinvere, as translator and translation editor. She has translated an essay-length biography of Reinvere and an essay about his work, 'The Art of Grieving' by Sofi Oksanen. She has edited the libretti of three of his operas and an essay about his music by Gerhard Locke. Two of Aleman's book reviews have appeared in Commonweal magazine, where she has worked since 1997 as production editor. She lives in Jersey City with husband Tony Iannotti and their two cats. PENELOPE SHUTTLE (introducer) has published seven collections of poems since 1980, including a 'Selected Poems' in 1998 (OUP, Poetry Book Society Recommendation). 'Redgrove's Wife' (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize. Her latest collection is 'Sandgrain and Hourglass' (Bloodaxe Books, 2010). She has also published five novels, and is co-author of two prose works, 'The Wise Wound' and 'Alchemy for Women'. Since 1970 Penelope Shuttle has lived in Falmouth, Cornwall, and was married to the poet Peter Redgrove who died in 2003. She is a Hawthornden Fellow, and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2007. She is also current Chair of the Falmouth Poetry Group, a long-running workshop group founded by Peter Redgrove in 1972. She has been a judge for many poetry competitions, including The Arvon and The National. She has read her work at numerous festivals and venues in the UK, Europe and North America and a CD of her poems is available from The Poetry Archive.