How I became an expat from the UK
This happened maybe 20 years ago. Estonia was still much cheaper a very popular destination among the British stag-party goers. British bachelors-to-tie-the-knot-soon and their chums were a real nuisance – they were extremely loud, oftentimes rude and condescending towards local women. After an especially unpleasant encounter at a hotel lobby, I wrote a letter to the Editor of The Guardian. I never got to know if this letter got published but for a while, The Guardian kept me in their expats mailing list. At first, I thought that this was quite funny. And then I simply treated this as a compliment. After all, a renowned British newspaper had passed me for a native speaker.
Venturing into new territory in writing
I turned 50 in August 2024 and decided that it was time to do something with my ever-growing collection of poems. It just keeps mushrooming, and I have been very timid about it until now. Unlike articles, interviews and opinion articles that I have written during many years, and which have been published both in English and Estonian, poetry is very intimate. It is like walking naked down a crowded street with all faces turned in my direction. Or so I thought and was afraid of the limelight. Fortunately nowadays publishing has become so much easier and more egalitarian. And perhaps I have matured: after several second opinions and encouraging words from my friends, acquaintances and more importantly writers, who are native speakers of English, and write poetry, I felt that it was not that scary anymore to share my inner world with other people. And in a language that came to me when I was a teenager, not when I was born.
Writing poems is part of my daily life
I am an avid consumer of poetry in multiple languages. Yet, strangely enough, since studying English at the Tallinn University and at the University College of London, I have mainly been writing poems in English and have done this for over 30 years. It is as if suddenly a magic switch is turned on in my head. This can happen any time: when I wake up in the morning and see the sun peering through the blinds, or when I commute to the office, or after an interesting encounter with someone, or after a visit to an exhibition, or after reading a good book or while watching a small fluttering leaf spiral down from an aspen on my way to a training class.
Poetry is about integrity but never objective
I wrote on the back cover of my book: “Poems are like paintings but instead of a paintbrush, they are drawn by words. And the impressions and emotions that they create depend on the reader as much as they depend on the author.” Poetry is not an objective phenomenon like science and facts and should not be treated like one. And yet, through the subjectivity of selected rhymes and words that interact with each other and give birth to new meanings, paradoxically, there appears more clarity and, if we are lucky, also more objectivity. Or truthfulness.
I would also like to mention one more thing about my relationship with writing. In my opinion, one cannot fake poems. What matters is whether the intentions of the author are sincere. If the writing lacks integrity, it will lack one important ingredient, and thus the result of the creation process (a poem) is less appealing, less wholesome. Integrity is like the invisible glue that binds the words and compositions together.
Diana Yanson – a multitalented artist who illustrated and designed the book
This book would have never been published without my multitalented friend, Diana Yanson. I am deeply grateful for all her support and help. Diana’s works illustrating the book are minimalistic one-line drawings – simple but complex, sensual, emotional and with an unimaginable depth. They go soul-deep, manifest lightness and ease, and show how vulnerable and fragile we are.
I would like to stress that this is a very feminine book. And when I say feminine, I do not mean the clichés and patriarchal interpretations of what being a woman should look and feel like. We are not talking about eternally smiling half-naked sexy housemaids with big tits and swollen lips. This is a book by two mature women celebrating femininity. Nothing more. Nothing less.
What am I writing about? Mainly and selfishly about myself and my observations of life. I am both inspired and tormented by our contradictory human nature. And yet, I am an eternal optimist hidden in the shadow of a pessimist:
Good things come when you slow down
There will be fewer questions – answers come before
There will be less craving and yearning for something more
Just good things in the now
They only happen when you slow down
Content is more important than form but they both matter
I want my meanings to be coherent, my prose to be effortless instead of climbing up a steep hill, I want my words to flow easily, my sentences to make sense, not to test the limits of comprehension with incongruent structures and expressions that sound sophisticated on the outside but when you really pause to think what the hell they are supposed to mean, they render more form than content, although they can be very provocative or sound really beautiful at times.
An incomplete list of people who I am immensely grateful for:
I would like to thank you all who have in one or another way, either directly or indirectly, made this book possible:
Olari, my dear husband and life partner, for putting up with my antics
Erik and Henri, our dear boys, who have told me that they got the “writing gene” from me (obviously)
Karita, my dear friend who is always there when I need you
Kevin Frato, American author living in Sweden, for widening my horizons in creative writing
Nancy Coolidge for taking the time to read my poems and giving encouraging feedback
Jack Barnard, poet and writer living in LA who said a few years ago that “over the years of your writing, what I was most impressed with was the development of your consciousness”
Doris Kareva, Estonian poet and writer who said that my book was a good example of creative writing in a foreign language and that she had never encountered such consistency in clarifying when or why the author had written the respective poem (she meant that there is a short sentence under each poem explaining how it came about)
Toomas Tuulse, my friend, composer and poet who has enthused me, allowed me to translate his poems from Swedish to Estonian, and been kind and supportive in every possible way
All my friends and acquaintances who have been my fellow-travellers and inspired me in one or another way on this journey called life
Thank you – I am nothing without you!
When gods play dice
Everything is at their mercy
A leaf is just a leaf
Feels cosy when nestled among its brothers and sisters
But when autumn comes
When the smell of post-blossoming hangover lingers in the nostrils
and a bitter taste of decay vexes the tastebuds,
Anything can happen.
A fragment from a poem “Never expect anything”1
- I deliberately avoid title-case capitalisation when I am writing. ↩︎