About the Book

As I read these poems, I am overwhelmed by the feeling that I am holding a box in my hands—one that rustles, swishes, murmurs, and clatters. Slowly, very slowly, it opens: barely audible, barely moving, almost imperceptible, almost overlooked. Line by line, a sensual soundscape takes shape, leading me through striking images of the world, into this one life that is by no means a straightforward motion. While with one hand I am constantly reaching upward, toward the full sky teeming with all kinds of birds, the other is drawn like a magnet into the dark depths of earth, waterways, forest. This is the poet’s magic box. Somewhere inside it, there is also an ear. It listens.

Lucija Stupica

The poems of Tina Volarič are not abstraction, not an alienated construct or invention, but sensation itself. A sense of wonder within feeling—one that is aware both of insensitivity (metallic slips) and of the limits (of duration) of human, animal, plant, home, city, village… within boundlessness: “Timelessness rolls on.” Although her poetry is filled with imagination, almost fairy-tale-like, it is not a fabrication, not dreamy, distant fantasy, but reality—one that arises fluidly in the authenticity of experience, from givenness and also from possibilities within reach of every body. Human self-absorption, which through ignorance and arrogance preys upon life, including its own, is cut through and transcended with a distinctive gentleness and inventiveness; thus, without moralizing—only through the suppleness of letter and line—it teaches us to perceive with the inner ear.

Diana Pungeršič, from the afterword