Beneath the Ice
An Anthology of Contemporary Icelandic Poetry edited by Helen Mitsios ISBN 13: 978-1-58498-112-1, $18.95,
“W.C. Williams said, ‘Write what’s in front of your nose.’ Iceland’s poets take to heart this literal truth in a surreal landscape. The results are poems that gaze at nature yet are heated from within by the subterranean currents boiling up through the pastoral and the mythic. For all of us that have wondered or rather fantasied, about the inhabited far north, this brilliant collection Beneath the Ice presents a contemporary and invaluable portrait of the state of the art of Icelandic poetry.” —Brenda Coultas.
“Beneath the Ice, Helen Mitsios’ superb edition of the best new poetry now being written in Iceland, that fabled land of Ice and Fire, offers generous selections from each poet, so that we get a sense of the range of voices, concerns, and poetics (from neo-pastoral to postmodern). Today’s Iceland is both worldly, a distinctly cosmopolitan and European country, and otherworldly at once. Today no elves, as one poem casually mentions in passing, just ice-flowers. Many of the poems are spare, understated, but in them is condensed the power of an Icelandic volcano under an apparently calm mountain face, a power and beauty that the translators convey deftly. Beneath the Ice is wonder. —Cynthia Hogue
Helen Mitsios is the editor of Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan, and New Japanese Voices: The Best Contemporary Fiction from Japan. She is the co-author of Waltzing with the Enemy: A Mother and Daughter Confront the Aftermath of the Holocaust. She is recipient of the Gwendolyn Swarthout Award in Poetry and is a professor of English at Touro College in New York City.
An Anthology of Contemporary Icelandic Poetry edited by Helen Mitsios ISBN 13: 978-1-58498-112-1, $18.95,
“W.C. Williams said, ‘Write what’s in front of your nose.’ Iceland’s poets take to heart this literal truth in a surreal landscape. The results are poems that gaze at nature yet are heated from within by the subterranean currents boiling up through the pastoral and the mythic. For all of us that have wondered or rather fantasied, about the inhabited far north, this brilliant collection Beneath the Ice presents a contemporary and invaluable portrait of the state of the art of Icelandic poetry.” —Brenda Coultas.
“Beneath the Ice, Helen Mitsios’ superb edition of the best new poetry now being written in Iceland, that fabled land of Ice and Fire, offers generous selections from each poet, so that we get a sense of the range of voices, concerns, and poetics (from neo-pastoral to postmodern). Today’s Iceland is both worldly, a distinctly cosmopolitan and European country, and otherworldly at once. Today no elves, as one poem casually mentions in passing, just ice-flowers. Many of the poems are spare, understated, but in them is condensed the power of an Icelandic volcano under an apparently calm mountain face, a power and beauty that the translators convey deftly. Beneath the Ice is wonder. —Cynthia Hogue
Helen Mitsios is the editor of Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan, and New Japanese Voices: The Best Contemporary Fiction from Japan. She is the co-author of Waltzing with the Enemy: A Mother and Daughter Confront the Aftermath of the Holocaust. She is recipient of the Gwendolyn Swarthout Award in Poetry and is a professor of English at Touro College in New York City.