Voices Over Water

D. Nurkse’s parents fled Nazi Europe during World War Two. He has published many books of poetry, and has also written on human rights issues and worked with Amnesty International USA.

‘I can’t praise D. Nurkse’s poems enough. I go to them to hear “the still sad music of humanity” and to celebrate it. Voices over Water has haunting cadences; the silences are heart-stopping.’ – Pascale Petit‘The opening monologues, set in Europe, explore the rhythms of a traditional life disrupted more and more brutally by wider political events … Nurkse’s remarkable devotion to the particular and sensitivity to place make these poems compelling.’ – Charles Bainbridge, Guardian‘Voices over Water attempts to provide a kind of micro-history of human hope and suffering: replacing objective fact with its subjective account of imagined lives … a “locket / showing the infant Mozart playing silence” may be damaged, yet still it harbours meaning: a “voice over water” that, like Nurkse’s poems, continues to carry, in spite of distortions.’ – Ben Wilkinson, Times Literary Supplement‘The collection comprises delicate, dreamlike lyrics, shifting between two epic, wintry landscapes . . . These are not poems to puzzle through. They are approachable in a way that much poetry isn’t, committed to providing lucid testimony.’ – Dai George, Poetry Review‘These poems . . . work both as discrete, individually imagined lyrics and also as chapters in an ongoing narrative of genuinely engaging lives. There are no sagging makeshifts here. A high proportion of the poems are gems of gravid simplicity, and Nurkse’s rhetorical periods can be breathtaking.’ – The New Yorker‘From the beginning of the first section, “Leaving Estonia”, the poems set out to be vividly physical, bringing together disparate elements that co-exist in real life but which might be filtered by too much intellectual analysis . . . startling images and crisp language combining the oblique clarity of R. S. Thomas with Kafka-like paradox . . . Voices over Water is one of the most consistently satisfying collections I have read this year.’ – Michael Bartholomew Biggs, londongrip.co.uk