Words Have Frozen Over

In her introduction to Words Have Frozen Over, Susan Wicks writes, It's de Burine's images that are the first thing that compels an English-speaking reader of these strange, passionate poems. Her poetry is built almost entirely on imagery, where metaphor is poetic structure, and the freedom of the vision itself becomes a source of meaning. The legacy of the Surrealists is immediately apparent.

Underlying the remarkable combination of image and pattern in these poems, there is also a recognisable human context. Childhood, intimate relationships, aging, loss, Aids, the Niverais landscape of her youth, the bars of the city, the town hall are all present.

This is a remarkable and haunting collection from a writer described by the Rimbaud Review in 1998 as the greatest female poetic voice of our time. Martin Sorrell's impeccable translation in every way serves to underline this claim.

Paperback
120 pages
ISBN 1-900072-50-5
Published January 2001

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