Living the Loss – Liliana Pasterska
ISBN: 9781788641708
£6.99
Grief runs through these poems, most beginning with an epigraph from a diary entry by Emily Brontë, whose first loss was her mother when she was just three years old.
We are in an interior world in this sequence, thoughts and feelings pouring through these elegant poems, but always anchored in the body, in the physical, It’s in the daily round of kneading the bread that anger is transferred from body to dough till both are transformed; it’s in the ‘intricate feathery leaflets/sweet chrysanthemum-like scent’ of yarrow that refuge is experienced; it’s in the imagination of an ‘island’s sun’ that dark thoughts (‘a crepe-winged crow’) find respite.
The poems move between the quiet daily life of a woman who loses those she loves over and over again and Emily Brontë as an extraordinary writer. And in that movement, emotions so earth-shattering, so veined with yearning, so unspeakable in their grief that they challenge death itself, find their form. Liliana Pasterska brings to life a soaring spirit in lucid images that leave us in awe.
Author biography
Liliana A. Pasterska was born in Poland and educated there as a paediatrician and psychiatrist. She worked in UK as a consultant psychiatrist for many years and became interested in the female condition, particularly in relation to the pioneering women writers of XIX century. Some of her poems have been published in the Journal of the Gaskell Society and in the anthologies of Manchester Stanza and Womanswrite groups. Her debut pamphlet was The Third Sister Speaks (Cinnamon Press), followed by Shadowmouth: Vitalie and Arthur Rimbaud—scenes from life. She is married with two adult children and three grandchildren and lives in London.