Six Latvian Poets, ed. Ieva Lesinska

In this second anthology introducing contemporary Baltic poetry, we meet the younger generation of Latvian poets who started writing and publishing after the country gained independence following the disintegration of the Soviet Union of which it had been part for half a century, a generation whose poetics is placed in a wider context by the editor and translator Ieva Lešinska and by the leading poet and translator of the older generation Juris Kronbergs, in their superbly informative introductions which offer many insights, both serious and witty, into the present and past of Latvian poetry.
"An overt engagement with history or social issues is almost totally absent from their work - perhaps because of an instinctive fear that the weight of history may turn out to be too much to bear and may squash their own creativity, perhaps because of a desire to place themselves in the broader context of world literature or simply because of a youthful opposition to their predecessors. Be that as it may, they are in the process of developing a new language (languages?) for Latvian poetry which will mature in unpredictable ways." (from the introduction by Ieva Lešinska)