Tsvetanka Elenkova

"These miraculous poems of everyday matter magnified by forty reveal our world in all its pristine glory - reminiscent of Pablo Neruda's household odes, but stranger. Her sketches of waterfalls are extraordinary, as if we are witnessing the birth of water and every inch hallucinatory. Her magnifying eye probes the roots of matter and spirit, where they intertwine and dance with light. Tsvetanka Elenkova has a mystic's eye, an inventive vision honed with surgical precision." -Pascale Petit "In Magnification Forty, Tsvetanka Elenkova turns her piercing poetic intelligence upon the small things of the world. She lifts them up to us in all their revelatory and spiritual power. Elenkova is a visionary, who makes quietness speak and who reminds us that the miracle of embodiment is realised not only in the exceptional but in what's humble and quotidian. This deeply mindful book is a call for us to pay attention to what we experience. It's also a masterclass in the lucid and economical poetics that have made Elenkova into a leading European poet." -Fiona Sampson

El s ptimo gesto, de la poeta b lgara Tsvetanka El nkova, permite al lector adentrarse en la poes a b lgara, una literatura tan desconocida como hermosa y cautivadora en su forma y contenido. El t tulo alude al s ptimo sello del mensaje del Apocalipsis en la Biblia, que signifi ca el silencio, y sirve de pretexto a la autora para sumergirnos en su estimulante universo po tico, donde se abordan los l mites entre real e irreal, sagrado y profano, banal y absolutamente necesario, plasmado aqu con gran talento. Los poemas en prosa de El nkova nos acercan al mundo de todos los d as: una tuber a de agua, un viaje en coche, un t nel, los cambios de estaci n, la dulzura del sol... y lo trasciende, de pronto, para conducirnos a un sorprendente cierre de poema que nos aboca, irremediablemente, al silencio y la refl exi n. El coraz n del lector palpita y se ve inmerso, sin haberlo previsto, en temas como la muerte, el amor, la familia o la teolog a cristiana ortodoxa, tan necesitada de ser comprendida por todas y todos los lectores en el establecimiento de un di logo con la insospechada belleza de la Europa del Este.

"The world according to Tsvetanka Elenkova is both lucid and hieratic. In it, a lover's eye is `a disc on a chain /with the god of the sun /the window casts on the wall'; but love itself is an `Altar' on which the lovers are `lying crosswise'. The poet's own narrative eye keeps shifting viewpoint - and perspective - not for the sake of it but to create depth and meaning: `The other side of perspective /is dimension'. It's all expressed with economy and the utmost clarity: yet that clarity is deceptive. These poems, too, depend on your point of view: `Reflection is capture' indeed, and reflection may be not only the untroubled mirror image, but the pause and re-handling of meditation. Another way to say all this is that Elenkova is a religious mystic; [...] She lives in the world of cars, mobile phones and city parks, and has an imagination stuffed with cultural riches, [...b]ut she also lives in a poetic world [...] of religious mystery, mortality, love and desire. This mystical verse dives repeatedly into the given, and discovers there a world of symbol and - perhaps above all - movement. It is not Gerard Manley Hopkins's search for `inscape', but instead an apprehension that from moment to moment forms itself into symbolic codes - and then releases those codes into the material, sensual world." -Fiona Sampson

The most striking image of extreme eros and extreme pain is that of Christ on the Cross. This book of 77 poems by the Bulgarian author Tsvetanka Elenkova navigates between these two extremes. The poems are like a pulsation, or a gesture, and don't take a breath. In this sense, there is no space or silence in them and yet a gesture, for example of pointing or stopping, when it is tired and the fingers relax, becomes one of blessing and so it is that the poet Iana Boukova writes of this book: 'Gesture introduces silence, replacing words and their definitions. There are whole passages full of the underwater silence of one gesture'. It is rare to have a book of Bulgarian literature published in English and the reader will find here many elements of Bulgarian culture and the Orthodox tradition.