FAULTLINES by Caroline Maldonado
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Caroline Maldonado is a poet and translator, who for the last twenty years has divided her time between the UK and a village in rural Italy. Poetry publications include her pamphlet What they say in Avenale (Indigo Dreams Publishing 2014) and four books translated from Italian published by Smokestack Books (2013-2022) including Isabella which contains her own poems together with translations of poetry by Renaissance poet Isabella Morra, commended in the University of Warwick’s competition ‘Women in Translation’ 2019. Faultlines is Caroline Maldonado's first full collection of her own poems. For more information about Caroline and her work, please visit
http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/carolinemaldonadobiog.shtml |
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"To me Maldonado is a memory bearer in poems that allow the wind to blow through them, poems that remind us we are not as much in control as we would like to think. The darkness and terror that the earthquakes in Italy opened the poet’s eyes to are examined through a different lens in Interiors, the last section of the book. Its nine poems move inexorably through the landscapes of the interior mind. It is the ekphrastic poem ‘Goethe in Rome’ that closes the collection that stuns. Goethe changed how the world viewed darkness, indicating that darkness is something vibrant that exists all the time and that light is merely a means to see it. Maldonado has done the same in this collection, albeit through the darkness of landscape and its terrifying and mesmerising control of all of us. A fascinating read. Go grab a copy."
— Deirdre Anne Hines (The High Window Autumn 2022 Issue) [Deirdre Anne Hines is an award winning poet and playwright. Her first book of poems The Language of Coats was published by New Island Books, and includes the poems which won the Listowel Poetry Collection Award.] Images of exile and violence haunt many of the poems in Faultlines. The context moves from the city of Berlin to the reed-beds of East Anglia, but mainly it is Italy that breathes through this colllection. The central sequence 'Faultlines' responds to the actual and metaphorical resonances of the 2016 earthquake in Le Marche. Throughout the collection, with an essential lyricism of tone, and occasionally returning to Italian forms of sonnet, terza rima and sestina, she explores the painful realities of 21st century life and the chasms, environmental, political and personal, that open up around us.
Reviewing in London Grip in September 2022, Alex Josephy comments:
"I can hardly believe that this is Maldonado’s first full collection. She is well known for her work as an award winning poetry translator and as a former chair of the Board of Trustees for Modern Poetry in Translation. And the poems in this collection are as sure-footed and delightful as might be expected by anyone familiar with her translations.[...] Maldonado’s poems speak in different contexts about powerful natural and historical forces, disaster and restoration, with an eye on constant alert for what is beautiful and what is painful. " Praise for previous books by Caroline Maldonado:
Isabella (Smokestack Books)
Ms. Maldonado treats her subject with care, compassion, and a deftness of touch that rounds and furnishes our impression of Isabella. — Felix Cassiel, The Recusant Taken together, Maldonado’s introduction, her translations of Morra and her own poems of discovery constitute a superbly integrated whole which provides powerful testimony to the transcendence of art in even the most dourly unfavourable circumstances. — David Cooke, The North I applaud Maldonado for her gracious sharing, shrewd observation and linguistic skills. This poet has attentively taken Morra’s work, loyally giving the voiceless a vociferous writing life whilst, in solidarity, wrapping her own voice around it. —Julie Hogg, London Grip As she has surely done in producing this fascinating little book, Maldonado intends to give Morra a voice in many of these new poems and, in ‘Scirocco’, we hear this imprisoned young woman poignantly repeating, “Who will ever hear me?” Both translator and publisher are to be congratulated in this recovering of an almost lost female voice from Renaissance Italy. — Martyn Crucefix What they say in Avenale (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2014)
An extraordinary and exhilarating way of seeing — Allen Prowle, Saboteur Beautiful, evocative poems with a lightness to them and a careful precision – nothing seems excess, all the words feel weighed placed…a consummate performance, altogether. — Sasha Dugdale |
ISBN 978-1-913329-67-9
2022 Paperback, 148 x 210mm VOLE Books imprint RRP £10.00 THIS PAYPAL BUTTON IS FOR UK ORDERS ONLY |
