Negative Space
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- €10.99
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- €10.99
Publisher Description
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.
Negative Space is also a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Celebrated Albanian writer Lleshanaku interrogates the boundaries between politics and family life in these poems culled from her previous collections, Almost Yesterday (2012) and Homo Antarcticus (2015). Wry and self-aware, Lleshanaku's writing posits the public, political, and economic realms as inherently unstable, with domestic life as a grounding force. For Lleshanaku, what happens inside the home remains intimate and mysterious: "To show someone your library is an intimate gesture,/ like giving him a map, a tourist map of the self." As the work unfolds, so does the interplay between public and private life, starting with the speaker's childhood: "And I was raised on the via politica/ with the grease of yesterday's glories,/ a thick grease collected under arctic skies." Here, Lleshanaku positions domestic life as the infrastructure that supports, upholds, and sustains the political realm, and reminds the reader that political ideologies, like family ties, are inherited. Lleshanaku presents the domestic, its unseen labor and stabilizing force, as endangered by oppressive political regimes. But she also suggests that resistance begins at home, envisioning a revolution that empowers women most of all. Though the thinking behind Lleshanaku's poems consistently impresses, the book's tonal uniformity and formal consistency fail to do her provocative ideas justice.
