Monta Kroma (1919–1994) is one of the brightest and most innovative representatives of Latvian modernism, but her work has so far been studied very little. The poet's centenary's events and publications, including the selection of poems edited by literary scholar Agija Ābiķe-Kondrāte, highlight the role of this unusual poet in 1970s lyric space and throughout the history of Latvian poetry.
The poet's creative heritage, dating from the first book in 1947 to the last poems in 1993, combines two aesthetically and typologically contradictory periods of creation – socialist realism and modernism. The poet Māris Čaklais described this path of development of a creative personality as "breaking into two lives", while the most complete proof of Kroma’s deliberate abandonment of her earlier principles of writing is to be found in the chrestomatic collection Lūpas. Tu. Lūpas. Es (Lips. You. Lips. I, 1970): “I am changed, all of me”.
Agija Ābiķe-Kondrāte
The collection comprises poems from the poet’s modernist stage, beginning with a fragment from the poem Tālo apvāršņu zemē ("The Land of Distant Horizons", 1959) and ending with poems from the last stage of her life.