Kapusta - by Erín Moure (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In Kapusta, Moure performs silence on the page and aloud, writing "gesture" and "voice" to explore the relation between responsibility and place, body, and memory, sorrow and sonority. Here, poetry flourishes as a book "beyond the book," in a space of performance that starts and stops time.

In Little Theatres, Ern Moure's avatar Elisa Sampedrn first spoke about theatre and the need for smallness in order to articulate what is huge. Sampedrn, who reappears in the translation mystery O Resplandor as the translator of a language she does not speak, vanishes later in The Unmemntioable when the split in human identity that results from war and displacement is acknowledged. Now, in Kapusta, the character E. is alone, in the smallest of spaces - the bench behind her grandmother's woodstove in Alberta. Here, E. struggles to face the largest of historical and imagined spaces - the Holocaust in Western Ukraine, and to understand her mother's silence at the sadness of her forebears, her "salt-shaker love."

Review Quotes

"Moure's ambition is to transform the performance of poetry into poetry itself . . . it makes for a remarkable reading experience." -- Harvard Review on O Resplandor

Moure's book is ambitious and deeply original. It is a book of poetry that dismantles poetry; its lyric impulses give way to fragmentation, repetition, and tropes from absurdist theater.

Kapusta bursts with energy, pulsing within a vice-tight formal sophistication, while exploring themes of love, family, loss and motherhood with a genuine, plain lovingkindness. -- Quebec Writers' Federation's 2015 A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry

"As the bones of the millions of massacred Jews rattle under the earth (and the corpses shift under the tarp on stage), Moure's text shakes a stick at cultural deafness. The voice is turned back to the reader. 'You are my VOICE!' the character E. cries, and asks us to stop playing dead, to transform ash to pollen." -- Sarah Burgoyne, ARC Poetry Magazine

About the Author

Erín Moure is one of Canada's most eminent and respected poets, and a translator from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese. She is the author of 17 books of poetry and a book of essays, and has received the Governor General's Literary Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the A. M. Klein Prize, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her recent works include the book-length poem The Unmemntioable and Insecession, a memoir and poetics that is a companion text to her translation of Chus Pato's biopoetics, Secession. Her twelve books of poetry in translation include Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person by Alberto Caeiro/Fernando Pessoa, Nicole Brossard's White Piano (co-translated with Robert Majzels), Rosalia de Castro's Galician Songs, and Galician poet Chus Pato's acclaimed m- Talá, Charenton and Hordes of Writing.