The bilingual Velvet Series represents American poet Emily Dickinson (1830—1886).
My goal in compiling this collection of a hundred and one selected poems was both to present an overview of Dickinson’s most popular poems, and to introduce Latvian readers to her characteristic motifs and images.
Kārlis Vērdiņš
Dickinson’s poetry is traditionally ascribed to American romanticism. At the same time, one of the most popular words that researchers use to characterise Dickinson’s poetry, is idiosyncrasy, emphasizing the distinct peculiarity of her creative expression. Her contemporaries found it unacceptable: the fragmented form, heavily elliptical syntax, irregular use of capital letters emphasizing one or another word, the abundance of dashes in the middle and end of each line, the lack of punctuation, and grammatical errors. When modernist poetic language experiments turned the perception of poetry upside down all across the world in the 20th century, Dickinson’s idiosyncratic texts did not repel, but fascinated and invited to solve the riddles proposed by the author.