Colours of Mourning is a sequence of poems negotiating intergenerational trauma in conversation with the artwork of the poet’s grandfather, the painter and ceramicist Dante Elsner. Dante was a Polish Jew caught in the Nazi occupation of Poland. He lost his entire family and narrowly escaped death a number of times, ultimately living out the war by hiding in the forest and foraging for food. After the war, with no reason to remain in Poland, he left for Paris and then London, where he established himself as an artist. His story is told in the art book Dante Elsner, also available from Guillemot Press.

The pamphlet comes with a set of cards featuring the artwork of Dante Elsner.

Maia Elsner’s Colours of Mourning is a wonder of a book, and one that does wonders to what we know of ekphrastic poetry. Like a patient cinematographer, Elsner renders her grandfather’s art in pristine language that allows us to stand before the paintings as if indeed we’re in a gallery, walking among them, staring into them and being engulfed by them. But the book is also a story of familiar love and devotion, a meditation on art and inspiration, a celebration of survival, and a profound elegy for unimaginable loss that demands all that art can do to repair and console. Colours of Mourning is a prosodic tour de force by a gifted poet who took on a challenging project and delivered beautifully.

Khaled Mattawa

In Colours of Mourning, Maia Elsner weaves poems as geometries of attention that transcend the paper page. With deep tenderness and precision, Elsner’s poems teach us to read across space, time, and image; to trace the threads of inherited memory; to see; to re-see; to honor a life bound within a life, within a life, within a life. Elsner, writing in ekphrastic dialogue with her grandfather’s life and artwork, inscribes material textures of care, dignity, and perception into the lyric. As these poems reassemble a creative archive, they also expand our poetics of attention, illuminating—amidst histories of loss and rupture—breath, clay, colour, a possibility of light.

Carlina Duan

Maia Elsner is a Mexican-Polish-Jewish-British writer whose debut collection Overrun by Wild Boars (Flipped Eye, 2021) won a Somerset Maugham Award. She is currently a Zell Fellow at the Helen Zell Writer’s Program. Her non-fiction debut Dante Elsner was published by Guillemot Press in 2023 and is available here.

ISBN 978-1-913749-49-1 / 44 pages / 184 x 140mm / made on Arena papers

Bookling