Music for the Dead and Resurrected

"I left my copy at home and can’t even see the poems from it. But I remember reading them. For me these are not the kind of poems you read through in one go—these take two, three readings for me to dive under the layers and layers of experience that encompasses several generations. My memories of my grandmothers are scarce—I never knew my grandfathers—and as I was small I can’t remember talking to them a lot and being interested in their stories. Now their stories are what I would be writing down, every word, but they aren’t here to tell them. And many families are like that. There’s an unspoken tradition of being secretive in Belarus—I suppose it’s the influence of the Soviet Union: decades of repression, when speaking your real thoughts and ideas could cost you a life. “Language is a code, a key to the collective subconscious” Valzhyna Mort does more than just telling the stories—she delivers all the emotional load that our ancestors would often not talk about, not show, and often not be aware of. And the events that generations have been through are so important for us not for the mere fact of them, but for their impact on our countries, our families and us, inevitably. In the language of intellectual poetry Valzhyna Mort is telling about Belarus and Belarusians, making connections and making sense of who we are and why we are who we are. This poetry calls to your deepest subconscious by creating pictures so vivid you can see, feel, touch, walk among all the things and places you read about. A British edition of Music for the Dead and Resurrected is upcoming this spring from Bloomsbury Poetry."