Kristiina Ehin has three collections in English and might be said to be an established voice here, as far as any translated woman can claim that position. In Estonia she and her husband, the musician Silver Sepp, are celebrities (I mention this only because a sense of personal situation and social status permeates this collection). Ehin read at Poetry Parnassus in 2012, a remarkable, almost druidic performance, delivered in a long gossamer dress. The poems in On the Edge of a Sword stand in stark contrast to the slightly fey persona of that reading. They are hard, serious, almost journalistic texts, deeply involved in the woman's condition, in geopolitics, sexual politics and colonialism, They are delivered with disarming frankness: the personal is interwoven with the public, and both are informed by folklore, myth, place and season.

Take the long, limber and conversational poem 'Saaremaa Waltz', for example. Saaremaa is a beautiful Estonian island which was for years a top secret Soviet nuclear base. Russian forces have long since left Estonia, but Putin's foreign policy poses a constant threat to Estonian integrity. The poet and her husband, Silver, are driving near the Russian border and singing the waltz to calm their baby. They reflect on the words of the waltz: a young soldier wearing a golden star (presumably a Soviet soldier in the Second World War) woos a flaxen-haired Estonian girl who escapes him on the night when twilight and dawn kiss, the summer solstice. The poet recounts how Silver considers only the common male experience, the Russian soldier as young cannon fodder, and reassures her that there won't be another war. She counters that only yesterday there was news of Russia demonstrating a new nuclear warhead and the news robbed me of half a night's sleep. At the same time she wonders whether it is possible to evade the kiss of the occupier, to remain "unattainable" to the powerful colonising soldier without making him angry.

As all this runs through her head they drive through an area where military exercises are taking place and see a young soldier trudging along. But when she looks back at the soldier she discovers it is a young flaxen-haired girl. Elusive seductress or cannon fodder? What to make of this, except that sexual politics are both as new and as ancient as foreign Politics.

The poem 'Even I have seen Putin in a dream..,' aligns sexual harassment and aggressive foreign policy in uncomfortable ways. Dream Putin comes to the poet at a banquet after a summit meeting:

Even in the dream the woman knows that rebuff will end in death in the black woods. The only choice left to her — and by extension every victim of harassment, and every small country in the thrall of a larger empire — is to teeter on the wispy border between yes and no. Bravo to Ilmar Lehtpere for capturing this line so finely and rhythmically in his translation — it needed to be psychologically and linguistically perfect, and it is. Lehtpere has translated Ehin's work for years and the translations bear the marks of trust between translator and poet.