All I Have Is Words

the long version

"For various reasons but particularly due to political censorship, my poetry, written in prison, was published as a collection only in 1990. I myself, following several rejections by publishers, was not in a hurry to go public with the poems from those years, wanting my imprisonment experience to speak with a more mature and deeper voice. In the introduction to the first of the several books now published I wrote: "I have been unwilling to make claims of uniqueness for my life's most difficult period--those seven years of imprisonment. That which for me personally was a tragic exceptional experience, for my people was a horrific historical norm."--Excerpt from "The Prison in Literature and Literature in Prison" by Knuts Skujenieks.