Poetry
Tolmust ja värvidest
Not translated into English
Jaan Kaplinski · 1967
Synopsis
Forty-two poems, in which free verse, broad and almost chanted, alternates with rhymed pieces, brief and struck into formulas. Nature is perceived to the point of erasing the boundary between the one who looks and what he looks at; history, on the contrary, is held at a distance, with a pacifist refusal of its violence: here a defeated Gaulish chieftain speaks, there a king who had no land. According to the author, the whole collection is a struggle with limits, boxes and fetters, and an attempt to free oneself from them.
Context
The collection appeared in Tallinn in 1967 in the series Loomingu Raamatukogu; its title takes up the first words of the opening poem, which received the Juhan Liiv prize in 1968 and which had crystallised, according to the author, around an image that came in a dream. People at once noticed the new language, and even more the posture of a seer attributed to the poet. The poem about Vercingetorix was read as a veiled protest against the Soviet occupation, a reading the author later judged too narrow. Viivi Luik counts it among the books that changed her life.
Who it is for
Fifty-six pages of poems in Estonian. It helps to know that the sparseness that later made the author's reputation is not yet there: the style is elliptical and rich in metaphor.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the decisive and most influential book of its author, ranked among the major works of twentieth-century Estonian poetry.