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One of the first things you notice when you meet Dina Oktaviani is that she’s the kind of person who tends to say, sometimes rather bluntly, whatever she feels like.

The first thing you notice when you read her poems, meanwhile, is an undercurrent of loneliness. Not only her loneliness, but the loneliness in all of us.

What many of us cannot understand about our isolation and solitude, she describes sharply in layer after layer of experiences, shared directly or through intoxicating, detailed images and commanding grace.

The opening lines of the first poem in Dina’s latest book, “Hati Yang Patah Berjalan” (“Broken Heart Walking”), titled “A Path Toward Dina,” introduce us to the author’s main subjects and the sources of her loneliness — love and relationships.

The poem reads: “she’s going to walk through/the sharp rocks again/a path leading away from home/going to see the ocean in the sky/to hear the words of love from the wind’s lips/in every junction and fall/but what kind of love is this/which has hurt/and stolen the joy out of pain?”

In Dina’s hands the same themes found in millions of other poems, songs and stories throughout time discover new ways of reinventing themselves. Her simple words, wrought in a persistently startling fashion, expose her raw passion.

Her way of keeping pace with relationships that eventually defile themselves by taking away even the delight of wallowing in heartbreak, defines her ability to work comfortably in a realm where others seem stifled.

Her signature style, described by the prominent poet Sapardi Djoko Damono as “never before captured by other poets,” began with the 24-year-old’s first poetry collection, “Biografi Kehilangan” (“The Biography of Loss”).

Some readers will inevitably try to compare both the original and the translated versions of each poem, presented back-to-back, but will find that almost nothing is lost in the latter. This does not come as a surprise. The book’s editing was a collaboration between Dina, two other poets — M Aan Mansyur and Shinta Febriany — and Philip Hatch-Barnwell, a British interpreter.

There are only a couple of moments where the translation raises questions. In the English version of “Inertia,” for example, the line “gazes of the people i know on the wall,” would have been translated more accurately as “gazes of the people i know not on the wall.” And the English version of “Trinitas” (“Trinity”) scores the excessively dramatic line “no one knows, no one knows whose solitude it’s slashing.”

However, most of the Indonesian poems achieve the similar effects in their English translation. The use of straightforward words, with little changes here and there — a word added, subtracted or compacted, or the occasional re-slicing of lines — evoke the same feelings born out of the refined aloneness that is her poetry.

Also in “Broken Heart Walking” is “Hantu-Hantu Tanjungkarang” (“Ghosts of Tanjungkarang”). One of her longer poems, this is a reflection on her hometown and how she has seen the city become a remnant of what it once was. This poem was included in the collection “100 Puisi Indonesia Terbaik 2008” (“100 Best Indonesian Poems 2008”). Dalih Sembiring