Full Description
The Sky Around My Father charts the estrangement between a daughter and her charismatic but often terrifying father. With nuance and precision, these poems bear witness to a childhood shaped by fear, love and music - where admiration and foreboding uneasily coexist. Drawing on the language of Eastern European fairytales, folk music, chess and meteorology, Emilie Jelinek's sequence explores the mythic and monstrous dimensions of paternal absence. The observing moon, recurring throughout, becomes a quiet symbol of grief and longing, bridging distance with light. Through a textured blend of anecdotal and compressed lyric poems, she captures the reverberations of trauma and tenderness alike. At once intimate and archetypal, The Sky Around My Father confronts the deep complexities of the father-daughter bond - its beauty, its terror, and its lasting weather. Winner of the 2024 Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker.
Contents
7 Terms and Conditions
8 Vltava
9 Mother Tongue
10 Song for an Estranged Father
11 Pietà
12 This could be a fairytale
13 Portrait of Fear as a Shape-shifting, Flesh-eating Beast
14 Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins
15 Frontline Idiosyncrasies
16 The Battle at Aubers Ridge
17 Dissolution
18 Diagnosis
19 The Envelope
20 Forecast (1)
22 Rusalka's Other Song
23 Forecast (2)
24 My Father Washes His Hands of Me
25 Firstborn
26 Explaining You as an Extinction Event to My Children
27 The Wolf at the Window
28 Leaving the Dock at Ostend, July 1968
30 Ostinato in Something Minor
31 The Sky Around My Father
32 Acknowledgements & notes
