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TERRIBLY IN LOVE: SELECTED POEMS

TERRIBLY IN LOVE: SELECTED POEMS

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9981963-9-8

Pub Date: Sept. 2018

Pages: 160


By Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė

H.L. Hix and Julie Kane, editors


This bilingual edition is the first English-language collection by the most celebrated woman poet in Lithuania today. Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė’s voice is both cool and ferocious, as one might expect from the official translator of Sylvia Plath into Lithuanian.


Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė claims among her literary exemplars Marina Tsvetaeva, and one evidence of the force of Terribly in Love is its resonance with Tsvetaeva’s claim that, “The only salvation for me and my works is that, in my case, the demand of the time has turned out to be the command of conscience, a thing of eternity.” So it has proven for Marcinkevičiūtė. She is a female poet in a patriarchal society, and a Lithuanian poet active through her nation’s transition from Soviet satellite to EU member. The times have placed on her demands that have proven commands of conscience: to live as a woman and speak as a woman in a society that privileges male action, male vision, male voice; to live and speak as a citizen of a small nation under the rule of a large nation; to live and speak as a citizen of a small nation now being ruled (as are all nations) by the global market economy.


The poetry of Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė addresses with courage and clarity the question of how not only to survive, but also to maintain dignity and pursue integrity, in such conditions, how to fight back against the monsters of diminishment.

    Cabaret

    I forgot that in cabarets there should be no pauses,

    That the fire-eaters enter right after the passionate cancan.

    That’s why, though I tried to avoid it, I will push the button,

    Hard as it will be not to hear the barker announce my performance.


    There have to be blues—Oh, I so loved the roofs of Montmartre

    On New Year’s Eve, snow blowing in our faces, passersby wishing bon anne,

    And I would sing better, warmed by the audience, but like a cold weapon

    In the hands of a suicide, the trigger of the pause takes me out.


    It seems I forgot there should be no pauses in

    The biography of an artist who doesn’t want to be forgotten,

    But maybe it was Him, the Unseen Master, who has touched the button,

    Winding the tape so that it will not advance, and it cannot rewind.


    —Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė


    Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė has published more than a dozen collections of poetry at home in Lithuania. The most recent of these are Mano Poe(ma)ma (“My Poe(ma)ma”), 2017, and Veiksma-žodinė (Action Verb Acts), 2018. Authorized by the Plath estate, she is the official Lithuanian translator of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems (2017). Her many writing awards include the Poezijos Pavasaris (“Poetry Spring”) national poet laureateship.

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