Luljeta Lleshanaku belongs to the first “post-totalitarian” generation of Albanian poets. Born in 1968, she grew up under house arrest because of her family's opposition to Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist dictatorship, and was not permitted to attend college or to publish her poetry until the weakening and eventual collapse of the regime in the early 1990s. She won the prestigious International Kristal Vilenica Prize in 2009; in his judge's citation for that prize, Forrest Gander wrote: 'Luljeta Lleshanaku's poems take place in a melancholy landscape of mountain villages, chestnut trees, and collapsing futures where "spring kills solitude with its solitude" and the only emotional expression not considered a sign of weakness is impatience.' In her book HAYWIRE she turns to the fallout of her country’s past and its relation to herself and her family. Through intense, powerful lyrics, she explores how these histories intertwine and influence her childhood memories and the retelling of her family’s stories. Sorrow, death, imprisonment, and desire are some of the themes that echo deeply in her hauntingly beautiful poems. When Luljeta Lleshanaku visited Ireland to read at DLR Poetry Now in Dún Laoghaire in March 2010, Neil Astley filmed her reading a set of poems at Tibradden, Rathfarnham, south of Dublin (with thanks to Selina Guinness for hosting this). In this extract from that filming session, she reads four poems: 'Marked' (in both English and Albanian), 'The Mystery of Prayers', 'Monday in Seven Days' (parts 5 and 9) and 'Memory', all from HAYWIRE: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (2011). The translations of these poems are by Henry Israeli, Shpresa Qatipi and Albana Lleshanaku. Luljeta Lleshanaku's work is used in this film with the permission of her publishers, Bloodaxe Books, with thanks to New Directions, who publish two selections of her work in the US which the British edition draws upon. Neil Astley has been assisting Pamela Robertson-Pearce in filming poets reading their work for Bloodaxe's archive, website and DVD-books. Her first DVD-book, IN PERSON (edited by Neil Astley), was published by Bloodaxe in 2008, including films of 30 poets with an anthology containing all the poems read on the films.
