This collection is really beautiful and painful. I'm not sure I fully understood many of the poems because they do require effort and multiple rereadings, but I think they're worth the effort.

ESPECTACULAR
Uns poemes molt potents, tots. Estic molt agraïda a l'Andrea del passat que va comprar-lo quan encara no s'havia publicat i que em va arribar farà cosa d'un mes, de sorpresa. De veritat que són uns poemes realment bonics i l'imaginari que crea és cru i bonic alhora.

Hauntingly good.

"Absence of my blood from your history books
is the reason why, in the autumn, fog spreads itself on earth
in a silent protest."
from Music for a Girl's Voice and Bison

I bought this on a whim based on something I saw on Twitter. Weirdly.

Valzhyna Mort is a Belorussian poet and translator. The poetry explores growing up on Belarus and how you can keep your history and your memories when the - nameless obviously - authorities don't want you to remember. Certainly not publicly.

"One by one, streets introduce themselves
with the names of national
murderers."
from Bus Stops: Ars Poetica

Oddly my two favourite poems in the collection were the first long prose poem, 'Self-Portrait With The Palace of the Republic' and the last long poem, 'Music for a Girl's Voice and Bison'. Mort has a gift for good titles. Sometimes the poetry is allusive and illusive. I'm not going to pretend I understood everything or could grasp some of what the more surreal imagery meant. I am a bear of very little brain.

But the centre of this collection seems to be how everything is a memory. Every tree digs its roots into land packed with the dead. The murdered.

"Braid your bones neatly.
Braid your bones bravely.
Finger-comb your bones
into neat braids
in our woods, ravines, fields, swamps."
from An Attempt at Genealogy, 12

This would make a find poetic companion to 'Bloodlands' by Timothy Snyder.

This is the third collection from Mort and at some point, when I've got some money, I'll try to pick up the previous two. And I'll come back to this. There's more to be got from it than on my first read. I've said before that poetry doesn't need to open up its meaning on first reading. Sometimes you have to unpick it, dwell on the imagery. And I don't have a problem with that.

PS The author photograph on the back of this Bloomsbury edition made me think of Maria Falconetti as Joan d'Arc.

I was really expecting a lot more music interjected poems based on the description and although I think Mort has fantastic prose this collection just fell flat for me.