Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

These are ten young (well, they’re all in their early forties) poets, three of them women, all from a particular provincial region of Romania, Oltenia, and translated by ten young Irish poets. The book developed out of a cultural visit of Marin Sorescu, a distinguished elder who somehow managed to stay alive during the Ceausescu era. The ten Irish poets will appear translated in Romania.

     The poems are not overtly political: they're introverted poems, listening to the humanity that has been denied outside. Calujnai writes:

To this day I put my ear to the forest floor
straining for the sound, the plaintive notes
I learnt in my mother’s womb...

Like these other poets fresh from atheist domination, she reverberates to the sacred and is not afraid of names: “Then, under the close eye of Christ, / the water turned once more into wine.” The poets are aware of being poets, sharing the sacred role of poet during the triumph of totalitarian prose. Munteaunu writes: “My friends be warned of this: when a poet wants revenge/ He will forgive you...// So let it be known from here on in he’s in your midst,/ A forceless force// To be reckoned with so long, that is, as such a thing/ Is not against your own interests.”

     For Balanescu the external is really internal: “Perhaps it's winter nowhere else but the house, / and the twilight is the blue of my dreams.” Sometimes we fear the dawn more than we fear ourselves, but should we, he asks? Diaconu finds he cannot penetrate the inner life of the one he loves, which for him is true love: “I stopped at the very edge of you... and now my eye is cursed to see / in everything the absence which torments me.” For Pologea “the safe place is the nest / between your temples,” and her persona identifies with Magdalene and Iscariot; a garden smells like Gethsemane. For Hirghidus:

... sunk in the dark of your heart
the boundless is of you becomes pure sight

because at the source of it all
as shy as the angels
as flawless as deaths glare
the green of poetry shines.

     Reading Carmen Firan, one is often not sure whether the person addressed is a person, an angel, or God:

From time to time he comes
right down through my soul
till I can feel
earth getting heavier
pressed down
by his heel through mine...

If you have a taste for visionary or semi-visionary poetry, or like to be led into moods of contemplation which after all, is what major poetry used to be about you'll enjoy all of these ten poets, who are translated into good and convincing English. As so often, I find foreign poetry or the foreign poetry that’s less like ours refreshing. It’s a reminder of other potentialities, lost potentialities and new ones, of art and living. One can be given a taste of something some British poets are afraid of or don’t even know about. Have we perhaps been too spiritually flattened by our own kind of social bombardment to taste our own lonely inwardness and come through?