Winner of the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2024
Emilie Jelinek charts the estrangement between a daughter and her brilliant, charismatic but often terrifying father. With nuance and precision, these poems bear witness to a childhood shaped by fear, love and music – where admiration and foreboding uneasily coexist. Drawing on the language of Eastern European fairytales, folk music, chess and meteorology, Emilie Jelinek’s sequence explores the mythic and monstrous dimensions of paternal absence. The observing moon, recurring throughout, becomes a quiet symbol of grief and longing, bridging distance with light. Through a textured blend of anecdotal and compressed lyric poems, she captures the reverberations of trauma and tenderness alike. At once intimate and archetypal, The Sky Around My Father confronts the deep complexities of the father-daughter bond – its beauty, its terror, and its lasting weather.
‘Emilie Jelinek crafts a set of poems heavy with storm warnings, stalked by the presence of the father who carries a burden of rage passed down generations, ‘a man cut in half by history’… Through the ever-narrowing landscape of the man she knows, she contrives to suggest, with great skill and delicacy, not only a daughter’s pain and struggle to comprehend, but a whole nation’s turbulent history.’ – Imtiaz Dharker, Judge of the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2024
'In these elegant and unflinching poems, Emilie Jelinek sets out on a voyage of exploration, through storm and rough weather, to the land of her father. This is beautiful work: unafraid to examine how love, history and grief can painfully intertwine, and those we long for become unreachable to us.' – Liz Berry
‘These poems are exemplary in the measured way they answer Emilie Jelinek's need for a reckoning with her troubled and violent father. The recorded facts may be shocking, but through a variety of approaches and devices, including sometimes surprising but always apt metaphor, both justice and a degree of mercy are achieved. A new, true poet rests her case.’ – Christopher Reid
'Emilie Jelinek’s forthright, highly courageous collection The Sky Around My Father is a hymn to unsolvable complexity – the father is enormous, unnegotiable: he is the manspreading presence in the long shadow of whom a furious /perplexed / disbelieving daughter attempts to find the most forgiving angle, the '…place where tenderness might grow.' Jelinek makes the dynamic entirely her own – the father gets in the way of everything: her poems cut their pathway around, then through him. Undercutting this sequence of love poems – because that’s exactly what they are – is a terrible ambivalence. With its exquisitely rendered variations, this is a first-rate collection that significantly adds to the dysfunctional father canon.’ – Tim Liardet
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