Selected Poems

Translated by Jaan Kaplinski with Sam Hamill, Hildi Hawkins, Fiona Sampson and Riina Tamm

Estonia’s Jaan Kaplinski is one of Europe’s major poets, and one of his country’s best-known writers and cultural figures. He was a member of the new post-Revolution Estonian parliament in 1992-95 and his essays on cultural transition and the challenges of globalisation are published across the Baltic region.

This selection includes work previously unpublished in English as well as poems drawn from all four of his previous UK collections: The Same Sea in Us All, The Wandering Border, Through the Forest and Evening Brings Everything Back.

‘He is re-thinking Europe, revisioning history, in these poems of our times. Elegant, musing, relentless, inward, fresh. Poems of gentle politics and love that sometimes scare you’ – Gary Snyder.

‘He is a rare mixture of intellect and real simplicity. Very conscious of the places words cannot reach, his poems create a space around them that is intensely good to be in’ – Philip Gross, Poetry Review.

‘Hell and heaven are exhilaratingly interfused in these poems, and the poet’s scale is his own littleness in “this huge blind wind”. His poems loom and soar, veering from lines of one word to sweeping bravura meditations, and achieve a great beauty’ – Adam Thorpe, Observer.