To Taste the River

Baiba Bicole belongs to the postwar generation of Latvian poets living in exile who reached artistic maturity outside their native country and broke with the older exile generation’s traditional, nationalistic poetry. In To Taste the River, Bicole’s poems are lyrical and personal, often with intense emotion and startling imagery. Shown through different prisms, like variations on a theme, her subjects include separation, loss, and time; the power of language and song; and love. Central to her vision is nature, both as subject and metaphor. Appearing most frequently are waters (rain, mist, ice, rivers), birds, sun, and sky. Her unique voice renders a continuing motif of thirst, along with the need for freedom and movement, usually expressed through transformation. Nature in her poetry is distinct in that it is rooted in the world of the traditional Latvian folk songs, the dainas, where nature is animistic and personified, and the human and natural worlds are deeply interrelated. This is Bicole’s first collection of poems in English translation.