From my month in the International Writers’ and Translators’ House in Ventspils has come a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with renowned Italian translator Silvia Pareschi. Silvia was asked by online magazine Doppiozero to write a piece called ‘Cartolina dalla Lettonia’ – Postcards from Latvia. Silvia asked me to provide some photographs and the short poems I wrote to go with them. The link to Cartolina dalla Lettonia is here. Right click to read it in English (I had to, my Italian is rudimentary).

Here’s some of the work I was able to share.

stucco tumbles the length
of a dark century
on Kuginieku iela
where the ghetto was

Dwarfed by the new
millennium,
smutted by coaldust,
craned over daily,
the brick warehouse
arches an eyebrow.

Borrowed bike.
Boating cow.