Lev Detela – LIGHT ON A CRIMSON SHORE

In a row of collections of poems by Lev Detela “twin” collections were published in the same year – Stars, Traps and A Light on a Crimson Shore which despite their basic apocalyptic visions are simultaneously the peak of author’s so-to-say “vitalist brightness”. The Brightening, as already implied by the very title A Light on a Crimson Shore, is a striking conceptual innovation in a sequence of the titles of his previous collections, mostly gloomily coordinated (e.g. What the Night Said; Café Noir); here, of course, there is no naïve or populist cheap optimism whatsoever. A reference to an anonymous star in the first poem of the first collection is the initial poem A Light on a Crimson Shore comprising a thematically oriented and a kind of a baroque subtitle Ballad Elegies and Romance SMS Epics, determined by the introductory dedication of Love (in a Single Sentence). The poem with a musical vocabulary in its title and twelve lines announces the subsequent cycle A Short Potamology yet in Twelve Études. It is quite obvious from the inner, intertwined connotations of the both titles that the author, although his collections might somewhat seem “spontaneously chaotic” at the first superficial glance, builds up his literary-textual cycles with the precision of a composer. From a thematical point of view potamology (a scientific study of rivers) refers to author’s environment-conscientious dedication to water (in Stars, Traps it is the tree), in other words to the rivers as archetypal symbols of arrivals and departures. Therein the author speaks up in the first person narrative about the interwoven net of the phenomenon of a river and human love (river reference converts into a human narrative: “There by the river I shall put my arms around you”, 6; quote)