Music for the Dead and Resurrected / Valzhyna Mort

Description

Music for the Dead and Resurrected captures the complexity of living in the shadows of imperial force, of the vulnerability of bodies, of seeing with more than the eyes.

Valzhyna Mort’s work is characterised by a memorial sensibility that honours those lost to the violences of nation states. In Music for the Dead and Resurrected the poet offers us a body of work which balances political import with serious play. There are few poets writing with such an intuitive sense of the balance between arcane and contemporary currents in poetry. Mort’s lines are timeless, finely honed to last beyond a single lifetime.

[A] striking study of what Belarus can teach the world about state violence, collective memory, and the role of poetry in fighting tyranny . . . [Mort] captures, through language, the contours of dissent. Soviet monuments remain upright in Minsk, like concrete odes to terror, repression, and silence. And yet Music for the Dead and the Resurrected feels like its own monument, not only to Belarusians but also to victims of state violence around the world ― New Yorker

Review by The Guardian

Bloomsbury Poetry, 2022. Paperback, 112 p.

Belarusian translation / Па-беларуску