Do Not Awaken Them with Hammers

Sad, silly and fantastical: in her first poetry collection translated into English (after three previous collections, plus a novel, in her native Macedonian) Dimkovska pins readers to the wall with rapid-fire linguistic energy and the propulsion of her chosen form, the jagged, long-lined column. In this forceful translation, Dimkovska takes on love (there is a cryptic "A." who is often addressed), marriage, fertility, beauty ("[he] refreshes himself with L'Oreal / (because he's worth it) to exhaustion"), religion ("God is a polyglot. God nibbles at himself thus penetrating into / the word God"), Aristotle and, of course, poetry itself. The political realities of being a contemporary woman in Eastern Europe haunt the whole collection, as in "Decent Girl": "I'll wear embroidered blouses from the Ethnographic Museum / of Macedonia, and someone will have to pay for them." Although Dimkovska's distinctive zip does, at times, get lost in the prose-like quality of some of her lines, this collection is mostly exhilarating. "I will confess," Dimkovska writes, "that art is not—but should be— / a delight." As deep and complex as they are hilarious, these poems are powerfully delightful. (June)