Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Negative Space, Paperback / softback Book

Negative Space Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

Albania's Luljeta Lleshanaku grew up in negative space, living under family house arrest during the years of Enver Hoxha's autocratic communist rule.

Her recent poems are a response to what was missing then, not only in her life but for her whole generation, evoking absences, emptiness - what was unseen, unspoken or undone - through the concept of negative space.

The space around objects, not the objects themselves, becomes the real, most significant part of an image, bringing balance to the whole of a composition, so enabling Lleshanaku to look back at the reality of her Albanian past and give voice to those who could not speak for themselves.Many of the poems are tied to no specific place or time.

Histories intertwine and stories are re-framed, as in her long poem 'Homo Antarcticus', which traces the fate of an inspirational explorer who could adapt to months of near-starvation in sub-zero Antarctica but not to later life back in civilisation, one of a number of poems in the book relating to society's pressure on the individual.

Sorrow and death, love and desire, imprisonment and disappointment are all themes that echo deeply in Lleshanaku's hauntingly beautiful poems.

Negative Space draws on two recent collections published in Albania, Almost Yesterday (2012) and Homo Antarcticus (2015), and follows Haywire: New & Selected Poems, her first UK selection published by Bloodaxe in 2011, a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation which was shortlisted for the Corneliu M.

Popescu Prize in 2013. Negative Space is also a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, and was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize 2019.

Information

Other Formats

Save 10%

£12.00

£10.75

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information