ABSTRACT
Two very different collections, I Am Not from Here and The Scent of your Shadow, which sometimes share themes of love and family memories, reveal telling dichotomies that are instructive for contemporary European poetics at large. The Galician poet Maria do Cebreiro, the author of the former volume, writes long, cognitively complex poems based on asides, fragmentary narratives, and maxim-like statements. Whereas her Estonian counterpart, Kristiina Ehin, who penned the latter, often draws on the folkloric heritage of her homeland and seeks a sort of purity of vision and sentiment that is rarely seen in English-language verse nowadays. Cebreiro's poetry is as much a questioning or hypothetical staging of how we actually think, feel, remember, and anticipate as a direct evocation of primary physical and mental experience. The lyric and emotional beauty that Ehin seeks can be set against the intellectuality, and the less immediate emotionality, of Cebreiro (whose poetry is nonetheless moving, sometimes at one remove).
