Born in 1968, Luljeta Lleshanaku came of age in post-communist Albania, free to write as she chose but with her imagination shaped by what had gone before under the regime of Enver Hoxha. After Hoxha's death in 1985 the dictatorship lasted until 1990. Lleshanaku's family had been opponents of the state, and she was forbidden to enter higher education or to publish her early work. Had she done so she would certainly have fallen foul of a system of censorship where even the most innocuous and conventional utterance was viewed with distrust.
The work Lleshanaku has gone on to publish is wholly unyielding in its fidelity to her own concerns. Hers are certainly poems about history, politics and power, but they are often cast in terms of local and domestic conditions in the old regime's climate of extreme provincialism. We hear of family graves with "four inches of space between them / lined up / like cars at a railway crossing", the war their occupants fought in long gone. We witness a trip to the cinema, study the second wife of a violent husband, overhear a family supper or the throwing of stones at a madwoman's roof.
Where meaning itself has been habitually so confined and suspect, the mere fact of a thing's existence seems to grant it a perverse immortality, since there is nothing more to take away. In the absence of power, irony becomes a form of resistance for its own sake. The world Lleshanaku often describes is like a room with no door, where everything that will ever be is already present: "The same war story told a hundred times / the same brand of cigarettes distributed by friendly hands / and those same eyes hovering, dark and lazy. / Only that."
In an essay reprinted here, Lleshanaku records that following a stay in the US she discarded most of the poems she had written while there, because "I felt as if I was following the wrong star  It was too easy to embrace the philosophy of a culture immersed in a long tradition of individualism  It is a philosophy completely alien to my culture." Perhaps, though, life outside the literary enclave is not so wholly different once you take away the numbers and the noise. The powerful "Marked" depicts a series of immutable fates: "the redheaded woman waiting for her drunk husband to return / will go on waiting for one hundred years. / It isn't the alcohol; she is marked by 'waiting'. / And he only as guilty as an onlooker / pushed indoors by rain."
This would certainly have made sense to a poet such as James Wright. But Lleshanaku is also original. When she turns her attention to love, the sense of human fate is unsparing. In "Particularly in the Morning" the familiar claim that love outbids history is turned on its head, to richly ambiguous effect: "although he is still sleeping / with the face of a stranger, the face of sleep, / a face without memory, / it is he and only he who knows my body's code / that flows like a river by a colony of gypsies / unaware of its source or estuary." In these conditions sentimentality seems inconceivable. The tyrant's insistence that there is no private realm has the unintended effect of making it necessary to write powerful and durable poems which suffer all the constraints imposed by confinement and yet have something ungovernable in reserve, namely their accuracy.
Sean O'Brien's November is published by Picador.