Voices Over Water

‘I can’t praise D. Nurkse’s poems enough. I go to them to hear “the still sad music of humanity” and to celebrate it. Voices over Water has haunting cadences; the silences are heart-stopping.’ – Pascale Petit
‘The opening monologues, set in Europe, explore the rhythms of a traditional life disrupted more and more brutally by wider political events … Nurkse’s remarkable devotion to the particular and sensitivity to place make these poems compelling.’ – Charles Bainbridge, Guardian
‘Voices over Water attempts to provide a kind of micro-history of human hope and suffering: replacing objective fact with its subjective account of imagined lives … a “locket / showing the infant Mozart playing silence” may be damaged, yet still it harbours meaning: a “voice over water” that, like Nurkse’s poems, continues to carry, in spite of distortions.’ – Ben Wilkinson, Times Literary Supplement
‘The collection comprises delicate, dreamlike lyrics, shifting between two epic, wintry landscapes . . . These are not poems to puzzle through. They are approachable in a way that much poetry isn’t, committed to providing lucid testimony.’ – Dai George, Poetry Review
‘These poems . . . work both as discrete, individually imagined lyrics and also as chapters in an ongoing narrative of genuinely engaging lives. There are no sagging makeshifts here. A high proportion of the poems are gems of gravid simplicity, and Nurkse’s rhetorical periods can be breathtaking.’ – The New Yorker
‘From the beginning of the first section, “Leaving Estonia”, the poems set out to be vividly physical, bringing together disparate elements that co-exist in real life but which might be filtered by too much intellectual analysis . . . startling images and crisp language combining the oblique clarity of R. S. Thomas with Kafka-like paradox . . . Voices over Water is one of the most consistently satisfying collections I have read this year.’ – Michael Bartholomew Biggs, londongrip.co.uk