Launch reading for books by Tomas Venclova, Pia Tafdrup and Ivan V. Lalić
Bloodaxe hosted this online launch event for new titles by Tomas Venclova, Pia Tafdrup and Ivan V. Lalić (1931-96) on Thursday 20 November 2025. Reading from and discussing the books with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley, were Tomas Venclova in Vilnius with translator Ellen Hinsey in Berlin, Pia Tafdrup in Copenhagen, and Ivan V. Lalić's translator Francis R. Jones (in Northumberland) with Professor Svetlana Šeatović (in Belgrade).
This free Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live and is now available to watch below, and on this YouTube page: https://youtube.com/live/OTRTqP2CCSc
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links:
Tomas Venclova: The Grove of the Eumenides: New & Selected Poems
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-grove-of-the-eumenides-1385
Pia Tafdrup: The Sight of Light • The Sound of Clouds • The Touch of Skin
Ivan V. Lalić: The Taste of Lightning: Selected Poems
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-taste-of-lightning-1383
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Tomas Venclova: The Grove of the Eumenides: New & Selected Poems
With The Grove of the Eumenides, the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova affirms his place as one of Europe’s greatest living poets, the heir to Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Miłosz. Venclova’s masterful poetry upholds a vision of the world that enables us to endure the darkness of our time through his singular insights, ethical endurance and profound compassion. With classical grace, yet manifesting a deep commitment to remain a witness to the contemporary world, The Grove of the Eumenides is a collection of great wisdom.
Venclova’s poetry addresses the desolate landscape of the aftermath of totalitarianism, as well as the ethical constants that allow for hope and perseverance. Bloodaxe published another selection of his poetry, The Junction, in 2008, bringing together new translations of his most recent work from that time as well as a selection of poems from his 1997 volume Winter Dialogue.
While The Junction covered poems written while he was still in Lithuania before his forced emigration – and poems from his first decades in the US dealing with exile – The Grove of the Eumenides addresses ‘later life’ issues of democracy, memory, climate, travel, ethics and ageing. There is no overlap between the two editions.
The Grove of the Eumenides was given a wonderful review in Asymptote Journal's November 2025 new books in translation feature. Read online here.
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Pia Tafdrup: The Sight of Light • The Sound of Clouds • The Touch of Skin
Pia Tafdrup is one of Denmark’s leading poets. She has published over 20 books in Danish since her first collection appeared in 1981, including widely admired sequences of themed collections. The latest of these is a series of five books focussing on the human senses, her Senses Quintet (2014-2022), which the critic Carsten Palmer Schale has called ‘a cathedral of the soul’ and ‘the best collection of poems written in Scandinavia in the past 20 years’.
Bloodaxe published David McDuff’s translation of the first two collections in the quintet, The Taste of Steel and The Smell of Snow, in one volume in 2021. This edition brings together his translations of the third, fourth and fifth parts, The Sight of Light, The Sound of Clouds and The Touch of Skin.
All parts of life are mediated through the five senses in the five books, including the way of the world and the losses that people sustain during the course of their lives – the disappearance of friends and family members, but also the erosion of control of one’s own existence. The themes of ecology, war and conflict are never far away, and there is a constant recognition of the circular nature of life, the interplay of the generations.
Five poems from The Sight of Light • The Sound of Clouds • The Touch of SkinThe Sight of Light • The Sound of Clouds • The Touch of Skin were featured in the Fall 2025 issue of Trafika Europe. Read the feature here. An interview with Pia Tafdrup about her Senses Quintet aired on Trafika Europe Radio in Feburary 2026. Listen here.
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Ivan V. Lalić: The Taste of Lightning: Selected Poems
The Taste of Lightning is a new selection of poems by Ivan V. Lalić, one of 20th-century Yugoslavia’s most crucial poets. Lalić’s poetry is alive with seeing and feeling the world – a world of sun and wind, water and fire. He is also a poet of love – a love for his wife Branka that ‘matures like wine’ over the decades. From adolescence, through young adulthood, to the onset of old age, where ‘We are twin foci of the same ellipse… Which links two other foci: death and love.’
But for Lalić, the seen and the felt need to be held in memory if they are to last beyond the instant. This means putting them into words, in speech or a poem, though doing so distances us from the raw freshness of experience: ‘Images I barter for the right to pronounce them, / Names I slip as a bribe to time’. Memory, for Lalić, is also cultural. Many of his poems speak about Yugoslavia’s Eastern and Western heritages. About his native Serbia’s history and landscape, and its roots in Byzantium and ultimately in Ancient Greece. But also the seascapes and culture of the Croatian Adriatic, and of Italy.
The Taste of Lightning introduces new readers to this grand master of European poetry, whose other books in English are now out of print. And for those who know Lalić’s poetic world, it combines revisions of previously published translations with poems not seen before in English.
The Taste of Lightning traces the whole arc of Lalić’s poetic career. From the directness of his early work in the 1950s, which emerged from the trauma of a wartime boyhood. Through the rich imagery and startlingly apt similes of his mature verse. But it also charts another voice, thoughtful and meditative, that gradually grows more prominent. This voice finally reflects, just before Lalić’s death in 1996, on what God’s purpose might be in a world wounded by personal and national tragedy: ‘may he forgive my fear / That he created me, as the book says, in his own image’.
Francis R. Jones, the book’s editor and translator, knew Lalić well, and has worked with his poems for almost five decades. Of Jones’s 15 translation prizes to date, five were awarded for his versions of Lalić’s poetry.
An early review of The Taste of Lightning was included in European Literature Network's Riveting Reviews feature of 27 June 2025. Read online here.
An excellent in-depth review was published online in Write Out Loud on 2 December 2025. Read here.
[20 October 2025]
