Elo Viiding’s poetry (in her first three published collections she used the pseudonym Elo Vee) has undergone several sharp swings in form, yet her texts always remain recognizable and individual. In Viiding’s poetry one can speak of both modernism and post-modernism, and also posit her texts in the feminist discourse – after all, the poet seeks expression, attempts to contribute something important to the language while at the same time fighting it, intensifies the language, and also happens to be female.

However, we can consider Viiding’s sometimes intolerably intensive poetry in a wider perspective. It seems that she perceives with extraordinary clarity the internal impulse of all kinds of need to create. This is the tension between the one who seeks expression and the surrounding social world. In Viiding’s mode the symbolic world always remains at least partly unintelligible, hostile, harassing. Viiding counters this with her weapon: words. Words band together into an army of weapons, and every word has in reserve a vial of antidote in its pocket.

Viiding’s debut took place early in the context of Estonian literature – the collection Telg (Axis) was published in 1990. It was followed by two collections of poetry at two-year intervals: Laeka lähedus (The Casket’s Closeness, 1993) and Võlavalgel (In the Light of Debt, 1995). A slightly longer pause followed, until 1998 when Viiding published a collection under her own name, entitled V. It presented clearly Viiding’s social irony, and on occasions even sarcasm. The collection is full of conceptual games with the same sign system, used by the poet in an attempt to diminish her own presence, which can still be sensed almost physically at moments of greatest illumination.

An even longer pause followed before the appearance of Viiding’s most mature collection Esimene tahe (First Wish, 2002), where the poet showers the reader with intensely personal images while at the same time offering an infinitely open – and also paradoxically closed - social eye.

Text by Jan Kaus