Evening brings everything back - Jaan Kaplinski

Estonia's Jaan Kaplinski is one of Europe's major poets. This selection brings together work from three books previously unpublished in English. These range from the intimate domestic portraits of Evening Brings Everything Back to the later poems of Summers and Springs, in which Kaplinski the public man - Nobel nominee and Parlia-mentary Deputy - reflects on the role of the individual in the world. The book's centrepiece is his autobiographical prose-poem Ice and Heather, an extended exploration of identity and the idea of "home" which is more topical than ever in today's changing Europe.;'A new light in the European galaxy' - Peter Levi, Independent;'He is re-thinking Europe, revisioning history, in these poems of our times. Elegant, musing, relentless, inward, fresh. Poems of gentle politics and love that sometimes scare you' - Gary Snyder;'Hell and heaven are exhilaratingly interfused in these poems, and the poet's scale is his own littleness in "this huge blind wind". His poems loom and soar, veering from lines of one word to sweeping bravura meditations, and achieve a great beauty' - Adam Thorpe, Observer;'He is a rare mixture of intellect and real simplicity. Very conscious of the places words cannot reach, his poems create a space around them that is intensely good to be in' - Philip Gross, Poetry Review;Jaan Kaplinski was born in Tartu in 1941, shortly after the Soviet occupation of Estonia. His mother was Estonian, and his Polish father died in a labour camp in northern Russia when Jaan was still a child. 'My childhood,' he has said, 'passed in Tartu, a war-devastated university town. It was a time of repression, fear, hypocrisy and poverty.';Jaan Kaplinski studied Romance Language and Linguistics at Tartu University and has worked as a researcher in linguistics, as a sociologist, ecologist and translator. He has lectured on the History of Western Civilisation at Tartu University and has been a student of Mahayana Buddhism and philosophies of the Far East. He has published several books of poetry and essays in Estonian, Finnish and English, and his work has been translated into Norwegian, Swedish, Latvian, Russian and Czech. Nominated for the Nobel Prize, Jaan Kaplinski published three earlier collections with Harvill in Britain, The Same Sea in Us All (1990), The Wandering Border (1992) and Through the Forest (1996), as well as a book of poems written in English, I Am the Spring in Tartu, published in Canada in 1991. His latest book of poems to be published in English is Evening Brings Everything Back (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), translated by the author with Fiona Sampson.;He has translated poetry from French, English, Spanish, Chinese and Swedish (a book of poems by Tomas Transtromer) and travelled in many countries, including Britain, China, Turkey and parts of Russia. Awarded many prizes and honours, he is a member of several learned societies including the Universal Academy of Cultures. Jaan Kaplinski was a member of the new post-Revolution Estonian parliament (Riigikogu) in 1992-95 and his essays on cultural transition and the challenges of globalisation are published across the Baltic region. Further details and texts are on his website at: www kaplinski.com.