Barbara Korun, born in 1963 in Ljubljana, is a leading figure in the generation of radical young women poets writing in Slovenia. She is the author of Ostrina miline (‘The Edge of Grace’, Mladinska Knjiga, 1999), for which she received the National Book Fair Award for a debut collection. Her other collections of poetry and prose poems are Zapiski iz podmizja (‘Notes from under the Table’, Apokalipsa, 2003) and Razpoke (‘Fissures’, Nova Revija, 2004). A small chapbook in English, Chasms, appeared from Poetry Miscellany Publications, UT Chattanooga USA, in 2003, and a selected book of her poems in English, Songs of Earth and Light (Southword Editions, 2005) just came out in Ireland in the translation of Theo Dorgan.
Korun’s work has been published in many anthologies and reviews, in twelve languages. She works on the editorial boards of the literary journals Apokalipsa and Nova Revija.
Iztok Osojnik, Ana Jelnikar
The elements of Barbara Korun’s poems are easily stated: light, earth, air, stars, the animal realm, her beloved karst landscape, the sovereign erotics of being human. What gives these poems their lift and savour, however, is not so easily named. Korun is both blunt and subtle, at once fantastically delicate and brutally direct as she confronts the terror and mystery and rough joys of being a mind incarnate – or, if you prefer, a thinking animal. Nobody now writing in English is as daring or clear-eyed about desire at the twin edges of meaning and fear.
From the back cover of Songs of Earth and Light
Poems
Eurydice
White Room
Lioness
Wolf
The Moon Will Cover Me
Mirror
Pythias
Soon
On a Black Summer’s Night
Kiss
Towers of Karst
Breathing Together
Sisyphus
Birth
Birth of an Angel
Every Breath You Take
Two Gods
Cold Fire
