Liliana A. Pasterska

Liliana Pasterska is the maven of finding emotional depth in the detail of the everyday. In Brontë Journey we are invited to walk alongside a love story, one that is sundered by loss, yet shines all the more brightly for that. The language is clear and precise. The places resonate with the beauty and grief that unfold in the personal story of Charlotte Brontë and Arthur Bell Nichols at the heart of the collection. The voices of her subjects carry across time, not an act of ventriloquism, but of empathy and immersion. And if for Arthur, grieving as he leaves Yorkshire six years after Charlotte’s early and sudden death, “Roadside fuchsia will greet him / as if nothing had passed.”, the clue is in the ‘as if’. For so much has passed and this exquisite collection has allowed us in, invited us to share a moment with creatures whose lives still touch us. An elegant, heart-stopping collection.

Grief runs through these poems, most beginning with an epigraph from a diary entry by Emily Brontë, whose first loss was her mother when she was just three years old.We are in an interior world in this sequence, thoughts and feelings pouring through these elegant poems, but always anchored in the body, in the physical. It’s in the daily round of kneading the bread that anger is transferred from body to dough till both are transformed; it’s in the ‘intricate feathery leaflets/sweet chrysanthemum-like scent’ of yarrow that refuge is experienced; it’s in the imagination of an ‘island’s sun’ that dark thoughts (‘a crepe-winged crow’) find respite.The poems move between the quiet daily life of a woman who loses those she loves over and over again and Emily Brontë as an extraordinary writer. And in that movement, emotions so earth-shattering, so veined with yearning, so unspeakable in their grief that they challenge death itself, find their form. Liliana Pasterska brings to life a soaring spirit in lucid images that leave us in awe.