Epic poems drawn from Swedish writer Marie Silkeberg's most recent
books are matched with stills from her poetry films, putting word and
image in dialogue to explore ruins, cityscapes, the echoes of history,
all into the depth of language's power.
Marie Silkeberg has been a major voice in Swedish poetry since the early
1990s. In these poems, translated by Kelsi Vanada and drawn from her two
most recent collections, Atlantis and Till Damaskus (written with
Ghayath Almadhoun, whose poems from the collection were published in
English translation as Adrenalin), she tackles some of the most
wrenching events of recent decades--globalization, the escalating war in
Syria, and its ongoing aftermath and consequences. The speaker of these
poems lives in a reality informed by these events and by an older
European history. Taking the standpoint of listener and observer forced
to confront the horrors in present tense, the poems question how we
share the pain of others, and how the meeting between different
experiences of trauma influences language. The poems are matched with
stills from Silkeberg's poetry films, putting word and image in dialogue
to explore ruins, cityscapes, the echoes of history, all into the depth
of language's power.
