I organized my bookshelves the other day and found a chapbook
called Sun on a Knee (Ugly Duckling Press, 2005) by a poet named Tone Skrjanec, and it reawakened my admiration for the writer. I googled Tone
Skrjanec’s name and discovered he has a new book called Skin (Tavern Books, 2014) translated by Ana Pepelnik and Matthew Rohrer. Rohrer is one of my favourite poets, and
it’s always exciting to watch him apply his remarkable poetic gifts to
translation.
I found a sample of 4 poems from the book posted at Circumference, and reading
them was like walking along a sidewalk after a storm, trying not to step on
snapped power lines.
… i catch your fire only sometimes for a
moment
in my palms. sometimes the night is black, the lights are
out
yet everything glares and sparkles like we’re by the sea,
from one side sparkles the sea from the other, the world.
from [night is warm. it smell like boiled cabbage and
krizia.]
The back cover copy of the book states:
"The underlying poetic procedure is assembly. His aim is to
magnify and celebrate. His work in SKIN is humming with the landscape, the
city, and as the title suggests, the human body. Ċ krjanec's is the poetry of a
mindful observer."
I like those words, and reading the sample poems really
inspired me to look around at my own life and see what I could magnify and
celebrate. If the rest of the collection is anything like the 4 poems I read then I’m sure
it’ll be an amazing book. I’m looking forward to reading it one of these days.
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