News at Eleven: Now in his 70th year, the Estonian poet

Jaan Kaplinski has lived through Russian and German occupation, the death of his father in a Russian labour camp, the cold war and the eventual establishment of independence for the Baltic republics. He has himself served in government. His times could hardly have been more interesting. As he wryly says, "the East-West border is always wandering", though Estonia is "not far from Thule", but his Selected Poems takes a different route from many poets writing under the old Soviet bloc. His work is not hermetic, does not generally deal in fables or go in disguise. His attention is almost wholly directed at the natural world and the self's place in it.

from The Guardian: Selected Poems by Jaan Kaplinski--review

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