Cosmic Sadness by Jean Portante, translated by Zoe Skoulding Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

When asked by the public for contemporary poets writing about the natural world

He has since published a later collection

Tropes of the ‘good girl’

captured in poems of such exuberance and transformative energy you feel you are also running through the border

Cosmic Sadness by Jean Portante, translated by Zoe Skoulding Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal Rudyard KiplingCosmic Sadness is a glittering, grief struck astronomy of the everyday, in which kitchens, scaffolding, train stations and gardens tilt slowly into interstellar space. In Jean Portante's long, linked sequences, memory and matter are always in motion: roses drift above language, migratory birds arrive with their beaks nailed shut, drawers open on months, planets and old parents, while the sky behaves like a flooded cellar or a cracked cinema screen.