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Fresco: Selected Poetry of Luljeta Lleshanaku

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How to make poetry out of the nightmare of recent Albanian history? Luljeta Lleshanaku explores some of the ways in which public and private realms of experience meet and merge, in poems that haunt and delight in equal measures. What was once forbidden now comes into sharp focus, as in the mingling of philosophy, erotic memory, and religious imagery in the title poem, "Fresco."
These poems, these dark essays in ecstasy, see much farther than we can imagine.

Ably edited and translated into English from the Albanian by Henry Israeli and others, and enhanced with an informed and informative introduction Peter Constantine, the poetry by Luljeta Lleshanaku compiled in Fresco: Selected Poetry offers a voice that is clear, strong, and remarkably apolitical for someone who whose family were brutally oppressed during decades of Albanian communist regimes. Yearly Snow: In this city the yearly snow/leaning on sparse, lonesome trees/doesn't mean a thing./It signifies nothing more/than the meandering of a veteran/leaning on a wooden crutch.//The same war story told a hundred times/the same brand of cigarette distributed by friendly hands/and those same eyes hovering, dark and lazy./Only that. And the dry rhythmic knocking/until his silhouette disappears/amidst the shadows cast down by rooftops/their melting snow dripping/in terrible slowness...

How to make poetry out of the nightmare of recent Albanian history? Luljeta Lleshanaku explores some of the ways in which public and private realms of experience meet and merge, in poems that haunt and delight in equal measures. What was once forbidden now comes into sharp focus, as in the mingling of philosophy, erotic memory, and religious imagery in the title poem, Fresco.