Memory's Morning

A musical phrase, a dream image, the absence of a lover, fragments of conversation with friends, an atrocity, the fragility and infinite mutability of words . . . each of the 71 poems in this collection proliferates around its transient nucleus. Like cells in a body, they are dynamic repositories of the past, sites for the breakdown and synthesis of experience, receptors and translators of self-generated and external messages. The immediate setting of the poems is Europe, a continent of many languages, whose borders can be porous or impenetrable depending on who wants to cross them. A truly heterogeneous space, whose land- and mindscapes remain deeply scarred - but also nourished - by the events and concepts of not only the twentieth century. Although the poems in this book written over a period of four years are distinguished by annually changing forms, they have been arranged not chronologically but calendrically.

Born in 1958, Anne Blonstein lived in Basel, Switzerland from 1983, where she earned a living as a freelance translator and editor. Her poems and prose poetry appeared in journals and anthologies in the USA, Canada, Britain, Switzerland and Austria. She published a chapbook, sand.soda.lime, and collaborated with the Swiss composer, Mela Meierhans, on two works, canthus to canthus, and 4S. She died on 19 April 2011.