Published 2025. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848619661 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

In Tristia , Carmen Bugan tests the lyric against loss once again, as everything collapses around her, but this time much closer to home. These are poems about forging a stronger self in the fires of her lifetime, whether they are the forest fires that cover the American continent, the war in Ukraine, or her own world turned to ashes. The speaker in the poem ‘Enheduana’ laments:

He spat on my oven full of food,
Walked over my baskets full of bread,
Soiled the marriage bed, left the children crying,
And my heart toiling with heaven and earth.

Her poems insist on the beauty of the natural world, itself under threat, as a source of strength, as in ‘Hawk,’ where the speaker prays:

Hawk, take everything
That is weak in me,
In your claws: eat it.
Leave me wise and patient.

“[A] word-smithy that is now owned by an incorruptible woman of letters.” —Professor Sir Christopher Ricks, Along Heroic Lines

“Bugan’s own highly regarded poetry serves to distill the essence of her far-ranging political and cultural analysis and to reenact it in verse that strikes close to home.” —-George Kalogeris, Literary Matters

“Her mantra might be ‘No patriotism but in things’–things turned into images cut on a printer’s block. […] in these poems is an earnest voice, quiet but determined, taut with the discipline to sail past temptation, like Odysseus among the sirens—temptations to lose one’s self in lamentation, accusation, revenge.” —Lem Coley, The Manhattan Review — on Lilies from America

“She writes with disciplined precision, always attendant to the necessary nuance poetry demands. Her lyric voice and moral imagination in these poems gather energy from the urgency of daily concerns and anxieties, as well as the need to witness.” —Gerard Smyth, Poetry Editor of the Irish Times , on Time Being

“Bugan’s poetry is subtle, tends towards reticence, yet has an indelible staying power. Crossing the Carpathians is a moving exploration of the costs of survival and the survival of love.” —Jacqueline Pope, Harvard Review

I can certainly attest […] now, after being in Bugan’s world of “frail syllables”, that such an equilibrium between history and art is not only possible, but is often the only way to assuage pain, to release the caged birds, to free oneself from the shackles of grief.” —Simon Gatev, Dundee University Review of the Arts on Releasing the Porcelain Birds

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