Published as part of the Contemporary European Poetry series edited by Peter Milčák, Cranberry in Ice is a selection of poems by Ivan Laučík, whose poetic oeuvre forms an enduring and integral part of 20th-century Slovak poetry. The author is characterised by an intrinsic connection with the rugged high-mountain landscape, particularly caves, a ‘physical experience’ of the landscape, and an existential harmony with it. From the magnificently exuberant diversity of imagery and meaning in his first two collections, following an eighteen-year enforced ‘hiatus’, he gradually developed a more restrained and concentrated poetic expression, a poetics of more cohesive expression and form. The essential nature of his poetry and the author’s view of reality remain fundamentally unchanged; they merely pass, as it were, through the filter of a long-term ‘purifying’ maturation. Illustrated by Marek Ormandík and with a foreword by the Canadian poet Don Coles.
