A Large Czeslaw Milosz With a Dash of Elvis Presley Tania Skarynkina 9781910895221

Sitting by her window with a glass of cranberries in sugar syrup bought from a woman in the market who assured her they came from Karelia, she muses "Perhaps they have some other kind of effect when you eat them. Spiritual maybe? So I eat and wait for the Karelian cranberries to work their magic on me." Skarynkina is impelled to spend the last of her money on a trip to Krakow to meet Czeslaw Milosz but never finds his address, so he remains to her an idol like Elvis Presley dressed in gold lame. Each story has a charm and imaginative flight of its own.

Tania Skarynkina, poet and essayist, was born in 1969 in Smarhon, Belarus. During her life, she worked as a postwoman, journalist and illustrator. She writes poetry in Russian and essays in Belarusian. A Large Czeslaw Milosz with a Dash of Elvis Presley was originally published in 2015 and includes recollections of her childhood in Smarhon interwoven with thoughts on poets, philosophers and world literature as a whole.

'She writes as if penning a letter to a close friend, loosely, intimately, but never less engagingly...'

Country Life wrote of Skarynkina's essays that they 'exist at the very edge of what we can imagine.'