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Alien Matter: Selected Poems

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This is a book of exile, a book of longing, a book of faith, written by someone for whom the past is always elsewhere:

Sea of hills, sea of blood and sea
of the crooked roads, oceans of stones.
If one escapes both live and dead
one has to live without all roots.

And live she does, ferociously, in this uncompromising, passionate book. "From the country of institutes to the country of prostitutes," she writes in one poem, "Fetters have become a way of living."

"No dream can wake you up," she warns, "but wake you must / and soon":

Winter. Euterpe. Sleep in a land
one almost doesn't know. As though
I came, outsider to the end,
with barking everywhere I go.

These are mysterious, sorrowing, gorgeous poems, and they speak best for themselves:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

Consisting as I do of scraps of dreams,
of lands I've never seen, of underpinnings,
of air and salt, of elemental things
unmeddled with by endings or beginnings,

of clay and iron, and of ocean wave
and shingle crowds of feet have trod upon,
of faith and hope, stood at the wall, to brave
the rifles, turning into heavenly stone,

of quiet and simplicity, bestowed
upon us by a woman among women,
of emptiness that stretches like a road
into a vastness where things lose their meaning,

of whisperings, of looking long at that
which goes among us by the name of God,
at death, which never was, and now is not,
at life, of which so little can be had.

ALIEN MATTER is chockablock with pleasures and made me eager to find out where Derieva's journey will take her next.