The snow kimono

Ilona Martonfi's third poetry collection, The Snow Kimono, can best described as an obsession with truth. The Snow Kimono invites the reader into a magical world where reality shimmers with the fragile beauty of the moment and the dark, haunting awareness of a painful past that lingers just out of sight. Compassionate and disturbing, witness poems elaborate on history, exile, the war refugee, the dispossessed, and the disappeared. Other, more personal poems concern themselves with love, identity, place, and with loss -- especially in the series keening for a mentally ill daughter. The past and the present mix in this compelling collection of free verse and prose poetry that draw the reader into a language that illuminates the way in which the beauty of human spirit is both concise and eloquent.