Liliana A. Pasterska – författare

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.

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.

In The Third Sister Speaks Liliana A Pasterska immerses us in the voice of Anne Brontë—a frontierswoman and trailblazing writer of the mid 19th century who stepped out of ‘female’ territory to expose the taboos of her age, including gender inequality, marital abuse, the terrible conditions in which many women teachers worked and the effects of alcohol and substance abuse. A woman at the margins of her time, Anne Brontë lived for only 29 years, yet left a wealth of acute observation and sharp insight in her writing, as well as poetry that witnesses to her personal, spiritual and literary intelligence. For all of this, her voice is the one not often heard amongst the extraordinary Brontë sisters. But here is a corrective to this. In lyrical poetry originally commissioned for a programme of music and words celebrating Anne Brontë’s bicentenary, we enter Anne’s world. In this careful and beautifully achieved debut pamphlet, the voice of the poet reaches into the voice of a young woman still calling to the modern reader across time: elegant, spare, leaving space for silence and allowing its questions to resonate long after reading:I am a teller of truth a seer—can you hear me?