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.
