The Minotaur’s Daughter by Eva Luka, translated from the Slovakian by James Sutherland-Smith, Seagull Books, 2025
The Minotaur’s Daughter, the English-language debut of Slovakian poet Eva Luka, unfurls a tapestry of phantasmagoria, animism, resistance, and transgression. Born in 1965 in the town of Trnava, Eva Lukáčová’s career in verse began with the collection Divosestra (Wildsister), published in 1999, which was followed by Diabloň (Deviltree) in 2005 (upon which she began using the shortened version of her name), Havranjel (Ravenangel) in 2011, and Jazver (I-Beast) in 2019. The Minotaur’s Daughter contains work from the first three publications, compiling them in a immersive, wildly populated series that plunges their readers into a universe of vivid imagery and sensation.
From Divosestra, the title of a particular poem, ‘Diabloň’, became the title of Luka’s second collection; samely, ‘Havranje’ from Diabloň became the title poem of her third collection, from which the poem ‘Jazver’ (I-Beast) became the title of her fourth collection. This interconnectedness between the poet’s body of work reflects her continuity of themes and imagery—an ever-deepening quest to go into more complex levels of introspection. Prominently featuring various creatures and their biological transformations, Luka preserves throughout a distinct focus on water and the moist elements of body and nature.
In the piece that opens The Minotaur’s Daughter, ‘The Water Anomaly’, Luka explores the transformation of a hybrid aquatic being, describing the emergence of a snake-woman hybrid as ‘eight silver scales slough off’ from a fish. An amniotic quality permeates the language, wherein the ‘scaly woman’ emerges from the ‘disgusting, murky water’ to undergo a series of transformations, becoming a frog and a ‘cubic animal’. Later, a different kind of liquid metamorphosis is vividly rendered in ‘Virginia’, a poem on the death of Virginia Woolf; capturing the famed poet’s suicide, Luka describes her submergence:
I’m already in cold water, now a strange mass will move to my guts,
enter my vagina and fill me inside, coldness and emptiness and wet,
I’ll feel like some kind of mushroom, growing out of moisture and rotting
in moisture, as if moisture were an omnipresent, maternal power, primordial,
fore-mother, fore-sister and fore-cosmos.
The poet doesn’t portray water as the agent of death, but as that ancient primordial soup that gave rise to all life on earth, blurring the animate and the inanimate as the water percolates in Woolf’s blue heart.
Several triptychs run through The Minotaur’s Daughter, ‘Ravenangel’ being one of them. The central figure of the poems is the hybrid creature of the title, a fusion of an angel and the bird associated with misfortune, death, and darkness. Making its visitation to the narrator every night, the creature is not the harbinger of doom as written by Poe, but a sorrowful wanderer with heavy, rain-drenched wings, weary from the horrors of his nocturnal adventures. In this depiction, we observe Luka’s recurring focus on fluidity, as well as her fondness for memorable alliteration. The ‘sable-sad’ bird offers ‘slimy different stinks’, and the protagonist accepts the ‘sperm and spit’. At once, this piece reminded me of the paintings of artist Andrea Kowch—one of which depicts a murder of crows in mid-flight, surrounding a woman dressed in black.
As Kowch herself states, crows ‘symbolize the beauty of new beginnings after the end of a dark struggle; spiritual awakening after a period of soul-searching, and having the courage to face the unknown. . .’. It seems that Luka’s nighttime visitor again symbolises a profound transformation—perhaps after a period of profound darkness has faded. In his introduction, James Sutherland-Smith compares the ravenangel to Rilke’s monstrous angels in ‘The First Elegy’: ‘Every Angel is terrifying. / And so, I grip myself and choke down that call note / of dark sobbing.’ However, Luka’s rendering moves beyond the Rilkean dream realm into a world of flesh and blood; the creature leaves a ‘grey feather’ by the protagonist’s head in the morning. It is as much a creature of the conscious as it is of the subconscious, and by the end of the first poem, we see little ‘black children’, the ravenangel’s offspring come into life (another painterly reference comes to mind here: Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters).
These terrifying children are further enlivened in the second poem of the triptych, ‘Ravenangel II’, which presents a visceral abortive sequence focused on a toothless ravenangel baby, bleeding in the ‘blackened womb’ of the sleeper who is consumed by the pain of this ‘unwanted foetus’. Here, Luka acknowledges the reflective nature of insomnia and the silent, combative aspects of melancholia and depression. The ravenchild represents a new form of mental anguish, one that treads a path through darkness until it finally leads to a burial under ‘a dry, black, barren tree’. Is this nightmare finally coming to an end?
The final poem is a conversation between our protagonist and the ravenangel. In a surprising turn, she asks: ‘Why aren’t you my brother’. Like the Grim Reaper, the bird reassures her that her time hasn’t come yet, and that ‘sorrow still endures’.
From the flighty and the underwater, The Minotaur’s Daughter is filled with subterranean and terrestrial life forms: fruits in stages of necrosis, embryos, developing offspring, spiders, eggs, dragonflies, as well as imaginary creatures reminiscent of those found in a medieval bestiary. Poems like the titular ‘And Then They Saw The Minotaur’s Daughter’ and ‘Circe’ celebrate classical and mythological stories, and many of the poems plunge the reader straight into a scenery reminiscent of surrealistic artists like Leonora Carrington. In ‘Necromancer’, a vivid poem that luxuriates in objects, the charmer of the dead holds in his possession ‘a four-armed monkey, a longwinged butterfly-moth, all kinds of lepidoptera, dried fish stomachs, pages of old books’; and in ‘Among the Rose Hips’, someone puts a ‘slippery stone’ in the hollow under the throat of the narrator, and his hands are akin to ‘huge beetles swarming’ across her impatient body.
This gentle oppression in nature’s lap swells into a crescendo in poems like ‘I-Beast’ and ‘Deviltree’, where the former—a breathless free-verse jewel of sleeplessness—encounters ‘tatters of a body’ at night, with dead flies on the bed sheet, and in the latter, sensations arises unguarded ‘like froth bull’s spit’ among ‘poppies and dahlias, / huge as pies of meadow dragons’. Again and again, animalistic humanity and personified wildness are engaged in one symbiotic cycle in Luka’s universe, with the tangible motifs giving life to passion, pleasure, torment, disgust, horror, and pain—though always with a touch of magic. In one of my favourite poems, a centaur arrives at the protagonist’s house with a silver harmonica, and leaves her a kiss with the aftertaste of ‘ginger and a dreadful forest’ as ‘he carefully / bites out a pearl’ from her palm.
Through all the transfixing imagery and dreamy vignettes, Luka is ultimately forming a bold, transgressive nonconformism around gender roles, gender identity, and women’s bodies. ‘Wildbrother’ sees the poet imagining a male counterpart of the female consciousness, which accepts the ‘phantasmagorias which afflict’ as well as her ‘shallowness, rage, menstruation’—but in a vicious admittance that at once abnegates and addresses the gender binary and the privileging of sons over daughters, Luka’s narrator expresses that he ‘smells of everything/ that I could be if/ once I’d been born as him’.
Where the previously mentioned poems have claimed a depth and intensity of feminine transmutations, The Minotaur’s Daughter is also interested in communality and domesticity. In ‘Tuesday’, a group of ordinary women go to the market for fish and buckwheat, full of joy and phantasmagorical wonder. They ‘comb their hair before the mirror / and in a Bacchic prayer praise Tuesday’. Another Carrington-esque poem, ‘My Step-Sister’s Hen’, celebrates a playful charismatic sibling who holds a scarlet-feathered hen on a leash: ‘[t]hey lie together in a four-poster bed, reading / the daily press and the Pre-Raphaelite poets’ (though this happy relationship takes a mysterious turn from the point of view of the hen, who harbours the wish to leash its owner).
This generous collection of eighty-eight poems is a gift for the Anglosphere; Eva Luka might be one of the most original poets writing in Europe today, and Sutherland-Smith’s translation makes for a delightful and immersive reading experience, encouraging readers to revisit specific lines to savour their unique aftertaste. In all, it is perhaps the pagan quality of the metaphors or the rich imagery that is most captivating throughout these works, which exhibit a remarkable quality when viewed all together; Luka blends proprioception—the awareness of the body in space—and interoception—the awareness of bodily feelings—to create a hybrid sensory experience, and for this unique emergence alone, The Minotaur’s Daughter deserves a place on the shelf for any lover of poetry or the arts.
Sayani Sarkar has a PhD in biochemistry and structural biology from the University of Calcutta. She writes academic book reviews and interdisciplinary essays on her Substack newsletter called The Omnivore Scientist. Her reviews and essays fall within an intersection of science, nature, languages, arts, culture, and philosophy. Her works have been published in Full Stop, Tamarind Literary Magazine, LARB PubLab Magazine, Littera Magazine, The Coil Magazine, and The Curious Reader. Currently, she is the Editor-at-Large (India) with Asymptote Journal and a creative nonfiction reader for Hippocampus Magazine. She lives in Kolkata, India.
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