Mária Ferenčuhová has emerged as one of the most promising and original European poets of the twenty-first century and is a rising star at international festivals. Beginning as one of the cool, post-modernist Slovak "aNesthetic" and"Text" poets using a matter-of-fact language with precise visual perceptions, her work has expanded its range of concerns from urban life to a wider perception of the individual in a world damaged by history and threatened by environmental destruction. At the heart of her work is a profound belief in a necessary relationship between human beings and the earth.

METEOR

We prepared a terrible death for you.
We left you to brawl with wild beasts.
We thought you were one of them.
We let you parry fangs with milk teeth,
claws with the shells of your soft fingernails.

Our prolongation,
pink thread
tangled up in life
a ball of hair, tendons
and pliable bones.

In the middle of a man-made
rain-forest needing water three times a day
so it won’t change in the wilderness,
from what it’s been until now.

A calm unobtrusive moment
of entanglements. A leap to silence
only millions of cicadas
rhythming.

The last reflections of a six-year old:
Who cuts off the sun,
even when it’s burning,
who never gets tired
pushing it over our heads?
Who drifts meteors
across the sky?

Is the world so, as I see it?
Am I really
who I think I
was?