Martin Solotruk

• Glances meeting in a window’s blaze of light
  

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Via this act
of a shared gleam
in time
 
It’s as if we yearned
to escape this flat
 
where once again the days
get visibly ever shorter
 
But we were held up by our breath
 
It’s so good, that it owns us
and moves us both, however it likes
 
Even though from time to time
it catches us out, blowing hot and cold.
A ravenous gulf
an exhausted void.
 
Happily, however, it keeps pulling us away
with unexpected second thoughts
from freezing in time,
backhanding us towards
an unimaginable common horizon.
 
 

Photo by Martina Straková

MARTIN SOLOTRUK is a poet, cultural manager, translator, and academic researcher, born (1970) in Bratislava, Slovakia. Solotruk's first book of poetry Tiché vojny (Silent Wars, 1997) won the Slovak Literary Fund Best Debut Award. His later books of poetry include Mletie (Grinding, 2001), Planktón gravitácie (Plankton of Gravity, 2006), Lovestory: Agens And Paciens, (2007), and The Metaphysical Household (2017). His upcoming book of poetry, Atoms Beyond the Window, is due in 2025.  A solo book of Solotruk’s poetry was launched in March 2016, in Éditions Bruno Doucey, as part of his readings at Le Printemps des poètes festival, in Maison de la Poesie, in Paris. Solotruk gave invited readings and performances at numerous major festivals and events, worldwide, in over 20 countries, including Hong Kong Poetry Nights, Toronto International Festival of Authors, Poesie Festival Berlin, Genoa International Poetry Festival, Struga Poetry Nights, Taipei International Festival, Europe House in London, StAnza Festival in St. Andrews, UK, Vilenica Festival, Slovenia, and other major global poetry events. Solotruk has directed Ars Poetica, a renowned international poetry festival and publishing house (www.arspoetica.sk), an organization based in Bratislava, Slovakia, since 2003. For his translation of Ted Hughes' The Crow he won the 2007 prize for the best artistic translation in Slovakia.

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