Crookedness

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