We've been amazed and moved by the reception for Svetlana Lilova's Metaphysical Dictionary. Readers have called it profound, moving, dazzling, delightful, and most of all inspirational. It's one of the all-time bestsellers at Toronto's knife | fork | book poetry store; we've lost track of the number of notes we've received from people buying copies for friends and relatives. This little volume, with its clever Graham Falk illustrations, is a rare glimpse into the poetic workings of the poet's mind. For those who take its cue - and there are many - it becomes a prompt to examine your own relationship to the world. Metaphysical in methodology, psychological in scope, poetic in presentation. And those drawings!
Svetlana Lilova's Metaphysical Dictionary is a compendium of oblique definitions; a taxonomy of gists.
Psychological and emotional in content, yet pared down to the bare minimum and presented with complete lexical discipline, the Metaphysical Dictionary shows us an author grappling to explain the world to herself. Maybe this is something you do too - in fragments of thought in a journal, or in a sketchbook of brief impressions.
As poems, these are reductions, or Pound's gists and piths in extremis. They are beyond spare: all payload, no bulkhead. Sometimes an entry is simply the germ from which another poet might have grown a conventional poem. For example, witness:
shoulders the natural uniform
The real reward comes as the definitions accumulate. They fold back on themselves; elusive shapes crystallize and dissolve like transient origami.
Psychologically acute, suffused with feeling, with a personal narrative slipping between the lines, this book invites total immersion in the private language of its creator, and conveys (us to) the heart of a playful, enigmatic, whimsical, sometimes pained but always hopeful interior.
Profusely illustrated with 65 drawings by Graham Falk, whose charming cartoons, melancholy flowers, and effervescent still-lifes perfectly echo the tonal variety of Lilova's words.
a series of very short poems written as “definitions”, that truly hit hard and have a ton of impact despite their size. the more you read (and see how some definitions reference back to others) the more it makes sense and blends together to form a beautiful narrative of the author’s life experiences.
Metaphysical Dictionary by Svetlana Lilova is profound, whimsical and wise, delightfully illustrated by Graham Falk. At her recent book launch at Centennial College, the author described how, newly-arrived in Canada and never having heard spoken English, she traversed the city with a dictionary in hand. Fast-forward many years, and Lilova offers us a compass, a roadmap, a mirror and a prism through which we can distill our lived experience and inner selves in this small, elegant volume.
This metaphysical dictionary would have driven Wittgenstein out of his formalistic mind, which is why I love this daring collection. Lilova is a veritable artist of consciousness - her poems are laconic Pollack drips of connotational calligraphy - true impressionism. Sober and surreal at once.
[Metaphysical Dictionary] is set out in a typical dictionary format ... A series of beautiful short poems and abstract sentences relating to each word. The concept of this book is so unique and the end product, in both the physical and written sense, is just mesmerizing.
This book offered every range of emotion possible on each and every page. It might be short but it turned into an emotionally exhausting and thought-provoking read. And when I say short book, I mean that this is a really short book (it’s under 100 pages, features gorgeous illustrations which take up some of them and the poems and definitions number only a few lines or words each) and I finished it in under an hour. But I feel it deserves so much more than that. This book required my entire heart and mind whilst reading it and will require them both for a lot longer, I imagine. Reading this book wasn’t a passive action and it is not one which can be truly completed in the course of an hour. I have read each entry and now I am ready to immerse myself in the rereading and contemplation of each entry again, and again and again...
Reading this felt like almost an autobiography of the life of the author but also an exploration of the self. Lilova examined feelings and memories connected with each word that I never knew I harbored. Humans forms strings of letters and decide each string is a word. These words are then decided upon to be the linguistic and vocabular representative for an object or a feeling or an organism or a whole system of things... Here, this system is proven to be inadequate and instead connections are made between these words and your soul.
This sly, whimsical debut collection by Toronto poet Svetlana Lilova is not much more than pocket-sized, but its poetic reach is expansive. Lilova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and arrived in Canada without knowing any English, so having a dictionary on hand was essential. Metaphysical Dictionary is an idiosyncratic version of that survival tool. (It’s idiosyncratic even in form: the alphabetical entries are from A to Y.) In an interview with the literary magazine Canthius, Lilova explained that she chose terms that “possess personal emotional valence and associations.” At their best, these epigrammatic gems resonate profoundly. Throughout, there’s the sense of the poet trying to drill down to the essence of feelings and motives. Anger, for instance, is defined as “a scab/some of us sometimes peel/off the raw hurt.” Elsewhere, Lilova captures the paradoxical truth of “emptiness” as “the heaviest of feelings” and “stories” as “multipliers of our experience.”
