Diana Der-Hovanessian is the author of twenty-two books of poetry and translations and has received numerous awards for her work from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, and PEN-Columbia Translation Center, among others.
More than 100 years ago, Emily Dickinson wrote, "It is the pain of
a poem that comes first, and the form that follows." Here in
Der-Hovanessian's selected work, pain is derived from the cultural
dissolution of the war-eroded and occupied country of Armenia; it
resonates in concise statements about a people seeking desperately
to reestablish a sense of place. The poems address this necessity
through the conventions of dreamwork, invocations of the dead,
personae poems and through the speaker's firsthand reporting of
facts.--Publishers Weekly
While many of Der-Hovanessian's poems and award-winning
translations have appeared in small-press editions, readers without
a special interest in Armenian and Armenian American poetry may
have missed her work. But no one should miss this selection of old
and new poems, which comprises a personal, political, and cultural
history both moving and musical, bluntly stated yet elegant. . . .
Newcomers to Der-Hovanessian's poems will be moved to go out and
buy her translations and learn more about this world in which poets
were so central they had to be murdered first. For all
collections.--Library Journal
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