Doris Kareva |
Estonian poet Doris Kareva (b. 1958) has published ten collections of poems, a children's book and an experimental bilingual book in collaboration with the Russian poet Marina Tervonen. Her collections of poems published in the 1990s are Hingring (1997, SoulCircle), In the World's Place (1992) and Armuaeg (1991, Days of Grace). Her poetry appears as a temple, as an intermediary between man and god, the soul and the universe, silence and speech, Eros and Thanatos. Kareva's poems start out from silence - what exists before there are words - and rise up to attain the ideal, the perfect. Rhythm, rhyme and alliterations create in the poems an internal echo with tense relationships between the words. The poems provide the reader with a sense of flying; they are centrifugal, expanding, free of subjectivity. The main themes are love, grace and trust between people. Kareva regards human life as a time of grace - from the declaration of the judgement to its enforcement. Man is conscious of his mortality, of his momentary and random existence, but he still continues with his life and thereby provides himself and others with an opportunity to do good, to love. Kareva's poems, which have won several literary awards, have been translated into fifteen languages, including English, French, German, Russian, Swedish, Lithuanian and Slovenian. Kareva is currently literary editor of the Sirp weekly and Secretary General of the Estonian National Commission for UNESCO. She studied English language and literature at the University of Tarto and has produced Estonian versions of a large number of essays, poems and plays by English, American and Russian writers (Anna Akhmatova, Emily Dickinson, Joseph Brodsky, Shakespeare, W.H. Auden, Samuel Beckett). |
|
Writer gallery |