Published works · 2007 · 2009
The word as
glass and light
For Eva Fidjeland, poetry is not separate from her visual practice — it is the same act in a different medium. Both are about what passes through material and what remains.
Eva's literary debut, a meditation on transformation illustrated throughout with her own paintings. The poems move through states of change — glass cooling in lead channels, light shifting through coloured panes, the self in transit across continents.
Metamorfos takes its title from the Ovidian tradition — transformation not as loss but as the only true permanence. The collection draws on Eva's decades of travel and her experience of matter changing state: sand to glass, lead to line, experience to language.
Named for the ancient Near Eastern goddess Astarte — the morning and evening star, the feminine force across Mesopotamian, Phoenician, and Canaanite traditions — this spiral-bound collection connects Eva's Middle Eastern childhood to feminine mythology and cyclical time.
Accompanied by Eva's own photography, Astartes mage moves between Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iran, and Sweden, finding the same light in different skies. The goddess is the thread: older than the names we give her.
"The light that passes through glass is not the same light that entered it — it has been changed, coloured, slowed. That is what a poem does."
— Eva Fidjeland