Lala Heine-Koehn

Sensuous, lyrical and voluptuous, the poems of Touching Marble animate the space between art and life. Lala Heine-Koehn breathes new insights into the workings of the imagination, the arousal of fear and desire, and the dangerously porous borderlines between the inanimate and the animate, the object and the subject, and finally, between death and life. She sustains a graceful, sophisticated, and seductive tone in the display of a sensibility that is at once both unique and accessible. Her poems present a stark beauty that arise out of the worlds of art and ritual and into that of flesh, the touch which affirms life. In Touching Marble the statuesque and sculptural flesh is lifted from still dance into dancing life.

The poem reveals a throbbingly young and beautifully romantic heart in the author, who knows how to write touching poetry.…She once more fills my empty spaces with her poetry, and wondrously saves me from the banalities and pains of life and the ethereal, fultile and dictating fleetness of today and the pulverizingly printed and faced certainty of yesterday – for I, too, want to touch the majesty of the marble that she has immortalized now in this piece… that won’t crumble.
Miguel A. Olivé Iglesias

Lala Heine-Koehn was born in Poland and emigrated to Canada in the 1950s. She is a visual artist as well as a poet. Her poems have been published in English, Polish, Spanish, German, and other languages. She currently resides in Saskatoon.