The Arrival (Stahlecker Selections) - Softcover

Simko, Daniel; Forché, Carolyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1884800920 ISBN 13: 9781884800924

Publisher: Four Way Books, 2009

Synopsis

Poet and translator Daniel Simko emigrated with his parents to the U.S.A. and lived here until his death, aged 45, in 2004. Steeped in the traditions of European art, Simko remained reticent about publishing. Thanks to his literary executor, Carolyn Forché, this first collection, in the language Simko grew up into, showcases his gift for the unexpected, exact phrase. The Arrival maps a haunting choreography of travel, memory, and the body so gently you will feel you have been carrying this book around with you all along.

About this title

About the Author

DANIEL SIMKO was born in Czechoslovakia and came to this country shortly after the events of 1968. He is the translator of Autumn Sonata by Georg Trakl, which won the Poets’ House Translation Award in 1988. In 1989-90 he held a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Reviews

Starred Review. Simko's posthumous English-language debut is a long-awaited event for those who have known about his haunting poems. Simko was born in Czechoslovakia in 1969 and moved to the U.S. after the Soviet invasion of the country in the late '60s. He lived much of his life in New York—writing, participating in the literary scene, and translating an acclaimed volume of the poems of Georg Trakl—and died in 2004. Now, his executor, the poet Carolyn Forche, has shepherded his poems, which he was reluctant to publish in his lifetime, into print. Like Charles Simic, though devoid of Simic's playful humor, Simko's poetry has as its backdrop a hazy, surreal sense of life in a war-torn Eastern European landscape: I have mentioned fists, and departures,/ the dumb choreography of the blind. These poems are fragmentary but always sharp, their emotional weight clear. Simko probes the self, looking through pinholes for glimpses of other people: I wake up/ and you come/ with a shawl/ black with stars. And, like Frank Stanford, another poet whose influence has spread posthumously, Simko writes with haunting precision about death: I am entering you the way an angel enters a scythe. This book will be a bittersweet discovery to many who will wish this poet had more time. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Four Way Books
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1884800920
• ISBN 13: 9781884800924
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 100