ATOPON
BOOKS
Contrapasso
Diana S. Engelmann
Poetry
“Exiles are the first to know
Where the world ends.”
These poems, subtle, gently surreal in their sudden turns and juxtapositions, trace the fault lines, displacements, and polyphonies of an emigrant’s life. If they are cosmopolitan—stretched between continents, languages, histories, and cultures—it is with the awareness of a world fast losing its coherence as a world. Disaster lies beneath their surfaces, and we have to read them slowly, then more slowly, to see how it is our disaster, too, that of a modernity crumbling under the pressure of its own contradictions.
Possibilities of repair also exist here. Love permeates this work with all the light and warmth of the Mediterranean Sea, home for Diana S. Engelmann and a locus of both memory and loss. Recalling the sensibilities of compatriot Serbo-Croatians Ivan Lalić and Vasko Popa, but also Americans like H.D. and James Merrill, she looks within a European tradition for the moral as well as aesthetic resources to resist the destructive forces that threaten as never before to break a fundamental human connection and care.
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