Tristia

In Tristia, Carmen Bugan tests the lyric against loss once again, as everything collapses around her, but this time much closer to home. These are poems about forging a stronger self in the fires of her lifetime, whether they are the forest fires that cover the American continent, the war in Ukraine, or her own world turned to ashes. The speaker in the poem 'Enheduana' laments:

He spat on my oven full of food,

Walked over my baskets full of bread,

Soiled the marriage bed, left the children crying,

And my heart toiling with heaven and earth.

Her poems insist on the beauty of the natural world, itself under threat, as a source of strength, as in 'Hawk, ' where the speaker prays:

Hawk, take everything

That is weak in me,

In your claws: eat it.

Leave me wise and patient.

Author: Carmen Bugan
Publisher: Shearsman Books
Published: 01/24/2025
Pages: 88
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.31lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.21d
ISBN: 9781848619661

About the Author
Bugan, Carmen: - Carmen Bugan, George Orwell Prize Fellow, is an award-winning poet and writer who explores the expressions of historical and political upheaval in literature. She is the author of ten books including poetry, memoir, and criticism, and some of her work has been translated into Swedish, Polish, Italian, and Chinese. Tristia is her fifth collection published by Shearmsan Books. Bugan's monograph, Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2013/Routledge, 2020), has received international praise. Her most recent book of essays on politics and poetics, Poetry and the Language of Oppression (Oxford University Press, 2021), dealt with Cold War surveillance and considered the wider perspectives on writing in turbulent times; it was named an "essential book for writers" by Poets and Writers. Time Being (Shearsman, 2022), her most recent collection of poems, reflected on the pandemic and the changed sense of time. Her memoir, Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police (Picador/ Graywolf, 2012), was winner of the Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction, a finalist in the George Orwell Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was serialized as the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, as well as being a Waterstone's Book Club Choice. Bugan's new and selected poems, Lilies from America (Shearsman, 2019) received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Carmen Bugan was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan, and held teaching posts at New York University Abu Dhabi, Stony Brook University, University of Fribourg, and Oxford University, where she was a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature. Other fellowships and grants include Arts Council England and Hawthornden Fellowship.