Damascus, Atlantis

Epic poems drawn from Swedish writer Marie Silkeberg's most recent books are matched with stills from her poetry films, putting word and image in dialogue to explore ruins, cityscapes, the echoes of history, all into the depth of language's power.

Marie Silkeberg has been a major voice in Swedish poetry since the early 1990s. In these poems, translated by Kelsi Vanada and drawn from her two most recent collections, Atlantis and Till Damaskus (written with Ghayath Almadhoun, whose poems from the collection were published in English translation as Adrenalin), she tackles some of the most wrenching events of recent decades--globalization, the escalating war in Syria, and its ongoing aftermath and consequences. The speaker of these poems lives in a reality informed by these events and by an older European history. Taking the standpoint of listener and observer forced to confront the horrors in present tense, the poems question how we share the pain of others, and how the meeting between different experiences of trauma influences language. The poems are matched with stills from Silkeberg's poetry films, putting word and image in dialogue to explore ruins, cityscapes, the echoes of history, all into the depth of language's power.
 “As she moves from colonial amnesia to a fierce indictment of colonial rule, Silkeberg shows us what it means to inhabit today’s globalized world.”
  ---PoetryMarie Silkeberg is a poet, translator filmmaker living in Stockholm. She has published eight collections of poetry, including 23:23, Material, and, with Ghayath Almadhoun, Till Damaskus and Atlantis. She has translated Inger Christensen, Susan Howe, Patti Smith, Rosemarie Waldrop, and Claudia Rankine into Swedish. Together with different composers, filmmakers and poets she has authored text and sound compositions and poetry films that have been screened all over the world.