The Shape of Time is Doris Kareva's eleventh collection and, as with all her books, its publication was hailed as a major literary event in Estonia. In style, it is more restrained than her earlier collections but its themes are the same – love and its great enemies, death and time – and the poems still retain the romantic bravado and recklessness that make her work so compelling. 'This minutely sculpted, effortlessly elegant, and endlessly expansive collection is further evidence of an important poet at the height of her powers.' Acumen 'It is a work of pure lyricism that in a sense seems almost wholly rooted in personal feeling and experience. Some poems seem to have arisen almost immediately from specific occasions, if only through their flaring intensity; others to be a coming to terms with experience after time has passed... Many of the poems grow out of different kinds of pain such as the thwarting or loss of love, the attrition of time, or the anguish of an existence that seems