Growing Back: Poems 1972-1992 (The James Dickey Contemporary Poetry Series)

Growing Back, Rika Lesser's third collection of poetry, is a bridge that spans the poets and languages, family and friends she has made her life and its work. Written over two decades, many of the poems in this three-part collection predate those found in her acclaimed Etruscan Things and All We Need of Hell. In this latest volume, the well-known translator of Swedish and German poetry offers readers a selection that locates, embodies, and anchors the continuing achievements of her poetic work. In the first section, "Away," Lesser writes of her long relation to Sweden, her adoptive country. In the second, "The Gifts," she records her return home. The last, "About Men," displays her preoccupation with translation -of literature, of life, of "others" she finds in need of interpretation, whether they are poets like Ekelöf and Rilke, or quite generally members of the opposite sex. Growing Back, like her other collections, reveals Lesser's poetic undertaking to be a rhythmic making of forms, in which language and content kick against the limit of lines that are most often syllabically determined.