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Negative space

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  • Contributor: Gjika, Ani
    Date:
    Created
    2018
    Summary:

    Albania’s Luljeta Lleshanaku grew up in negative space, living under family house arrest during the years of Enver Hoxha’s autocratic communist rule. Her recent poems are a response to what was missing then, not only in her life but for her whole generation, evoking absences, emptiness – what was unseen, unspoken or undone – through the concept of negative space. The space around objects, not the objects themselves, becomes the real, most significant part of an image, bringing balance to the whole of a composition, so enabling Lleshanaku to look back at the reality of her Albanian past and give voice to those who could not speak for themselves.

    Many of the poems are tied to no specific place or time. Histories intertwine and stories are re-framed, as in her long poem ‘Homo Antarcticus’, which traces the fate of an inspirational explorer who could adapt to months of near-starvation in sub-zero Antarctica but not to later life back in civilisation, one of a number of poems in the book relating to society’s pressure on the individual. Sorrow and death, love and desire, imprisonment and disappointment are all themes that echo deeply in Lleshanaku’s hauntingly beautiful poems.

    Negative Space draws on two recent collections published in Albania, Almost Yesterday (2012) and Homo Antarcticus (2015), and follows Haywire: New & Selected Poems, her first UK selection published by Bloodaxe in 2011, a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation which was shortlisted for the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize in 2013.

    Contents:
    • Machine generated contents note: From Almost Yesterday (2012)
    • Almost Yesterday
    • Small-town Stations
    • Unknown
    • History Class
    • Children of Morality
    • Night Fishing
    • Tobacco
    • Second-hand Books
    • Negative Space
    • Mine, Yours
    • End of Summer
    • Via Politica
    • Deal
    • In the Town of Apples
    • Acupuncture
    • First Week of Retirement
    • Conversation with Charles Simic
    • Business of Dying
    • Metallic
    • Body's Delay
    • Two by Two
    • Gloves
    • I Came, I Saw, I Left...
    • Index
    • Transit Terminal
    • Live Music
    • Ramesses' Last Journey
    • From Homo Antarcticus (2015)
    • Homo Antarcticus
    • Something Bigger than Us
    • Menelaus's Return
    • Railway Boys
    • Metamorphosis
    • January 1, Dawn
    • Ageing
    • Fishermen's Village
    • Commit to Memory
    • Cities
    • Anatomical Cut
    • Self-portrait in Woven Fabrics
    • Water and Carbon
    • Home Sweet Home
    • This Gesture
    • Stairs
    • Lost in Translation
    • Perfect Day
    • One's Destiny
    • Inside a Suitcase
    • Things I Liked About Him.

     

    Original Publisher: Hexham, Northumberland, Bloodaxe Books Ltd
    Language(s): Albanian
    ISBN: 1780374127, 9781780374123
    Collection(s)/Series: Griffin Poetry Prize 2019