Kapusta

In Kapusta, Moure performs this silence on the page and aloud, writing ?gesture” and ?voice” to explore the relation between responsibility and place, body, memory, sorrow, and sonority. Here, poetry flourishes as a book ?beyond the book,” in a space of performance that starts and stops time.
In Little Theatres, Erin Moure’s avatar Elisa Sampedrin first spoke about theatre and the need for smallness in order to articulate what is huge. Sampedrin, who reappears in the translation mystery O Resplandor as the translator of a language she does not speak, vanishes later in The Unmemntioable when the split in human identity that results from war and displacement is acknowledged. Now, in Kapusta, the character E. is alone, in the smallest of spaces ? the bench behind her grandmother’s woodstove in Alberta. Here, E. struggles to face the largest of historical and imagined spaces ? the Holocaust in Western Ukraine, and to understand her mother’s silence at the sadness of her forebears, her ?salt-shaker love.”

Erin Moure is one of Canada’s most eminent and respected poets, and a translator from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese. She is the author of 17 books of poetry and a book of essays, and has received the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the A. M. Klein Prize, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her recent works include the book-length poem The Unmemntioable and Insecession, a memoir and poetics that is a companion text to her translation of Chus Pato’s biopoetics, Secession. Her twelve books of poetry in translation include Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person by Alberto Caeiro/Fernando Pessoa, Nicole Brossard’s White Piano (co-translated with Robert Majzels), Rosalia de Castro’s Galician Songs, and Galician poet Chus Pato’s acclaimed m- Tala, Charenton and Hordes of Writing.