A Note from the Poetry Editor
Poets must speak of their time, Czeslaw Milosz often told his students. And so they, in very different ways, do. Karim Fawzi, in a poem dated June 9th, 2003, speaks of berries and Baghdad, and of beating his present existence "with the cane of departure," while Valzhyna Mort tells us about the fate of her generation in post-Soviet (but still totalitarian) Belarus.
As you will browse through the pages of this special "all poetry" issue of
Words Without Borders you will discover many images, details, the tiniest moments tied together by emotion, wonder, rhythm. Thus, Gloria Fuertes's vigor, Daniil Kharms's theatrics of marvel, and Goran Sonnevi's passion for the smallest of details, for "The visions of birds / she and B had together, that attentiveness." Why such attentiveness in poetry? Why images-so many of them, reoccurring in poem after poem, line after line? Attentiveness, Paul Celan teaches us, is the natural prayer of the soul. As for images, they are perhaps the only universal language we have-a language that can be translated into any nation's dialect.