Description
“If warmth and wisdom are the two dominant qualities of this book, it is the voice of the poems which makes them so attractive.” Brook Emery, Mascara Literary Review http://tiny.cc/kbbau
‘My poems’ meaning reads like open palms …’
Nora Krouk writes of ardour, intimacy and pain in great age with wit and spontaneity. Her candour and the idiosyncratic rhythm and lineation of her verse contribute a strong and different voice to Australian poetry. She writes through a prismatic cultural perspective and with unremitting honesty of what it is to love and lose love at 90. Her technique and the tenor of this work make it powerful and haunting. Anna Kerdijk Nicholson
Read another review on Whispering Gums:
http://whisperinggums.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/nora-krouk-warming-the-core-of-things/
Written in three sections, ‘In Memoriam’, ‘Renewals’ and ‘Transitions’, Nora Krouk’s collection explores broad issues such as aging and memory, as well as personal ones, including the grief of losing those she loves. Written in an easy narrative style with haunting sensitivity, this collection does honour to a life well lived.
Nora Krouk’s poetry bears the traces of her Russian cultural heritage: lyricism, candour, a sense of the individual caught up in the tide of history, an appreciation of love, friendship, hospitality and beauty in all its forms in the course of a long and eventful life. John Carey
Warming the Core of Things is a compelling collection of poems that will appeal to both those who usually read poetry and those who don’t. Professor Elizabeth Webby
About the author:
Nora Krouk was born 90 years ago in Harbin, China. She worked as a journalist in Shanghai and Hong Kong. She has written Russian poetry since childhood, switching to English while living in Hong Kong, where a collection of her poetry, Even Though, was published. Her own Russian poetry has been published in various Shanghai magazines, New York’s New Review and Israel’s Yegund Yotseisin, as well as in the anthology Russian Poetry in China, published in Moscow in 2000 (winner of Russian Booker). In 1993 she won the Fellowship of Australian Writers’ Jean Stone Award, and in 2000 she shared the award in the Society of Women Writers Poetry Competition. She won first prize for poetry in the 2008 Antipodes Russian Literature Festival.
