“Tsvetanka Elenkova is an important figure in Bulgarian poetry. But her importance is much more than merely national. Her poems are still and controlled, yet are at the same time exercises in transcendence. They are both thought-experiments and insights. Elenkova is that rare thing in twenty-first century literature, a poet whose faith makes everything appear afresh. Tenderly, she offers the reader a world that is both familiar, and lightly transformed. Elenkova is surprising, necessary and unique.”
—Fiona Sampson
“Tsvetanka Elennkova’s devotion to dramatizing these quick shifts between mind and eye, eye and heart, help to give her poems a spiritual immediacy that bypasses the formalizing rituals and conventions of most religious poetry, whether those rituals and conventions be Christian, Buddhist, or what have you. It’s as if she writes a devotional poem that’s stripped of any conscious designs on the reader—as if the intensity of her experience is overheard as opposed to broadcast, shared out unawares, rather than being pressed into our notice. The essence of these poems is a prayerful relation to the world, but without being directed to God, or asking for something in return for her belief. All the poet asks is that language, as it makes its way to the page, remain vital and alert, as it embraces human conundrums and paradoxes.”
—from the introduction by Tom Sleigh
