Wozu Dichter...

Gross continuedfrom previous page American REVRW is described as a move into another language: "Mine was too small too poor too lazy / Too beautiful but self-destructive / in an old-fashioned romantic way." But Romania—"roMANIA" as one of her poems is titled—is not to be left behind: it is "like a hat glued / to my brain / like a sweater / made out of my skin / like a permanent tattoo / on my left lung...." Her poem "Suspendida" dramatizes emigration as an escape from the landscape of war and corpses into a net of new words, which are enumerated in their various versions, the poet holding on to her language and introducing parts of it into her new language. The middle part of the volume contains a series of poems called "Tristia: Letters of a Barbarian Woman," in which the present-day emigrant speaks through the ages to Ovid, expelled from Roma to what was then Dacia, and now the proto-Romanian figure of the exiled poet. The barbarian woman speaks to him in English and in a mixture of broken Latin and what I imagine is old Romanian. She does not celebrate him. Ovid is a barbarian woman's love and enemy, and not, as in the writings of Joseph Brodsky, a forefather. These poems express a great longing, but also a violent effort to find the poet's own voice, in whatever language it could happen. Besides displacement and search for a new way oftalking, it is the war that is overwhelmingly present in Stänescu's poetry. I do not believe it is the war of the past, the remembered war of her childhood she writes about (besides, she did not live, judging by her age, through a concrete war). The war is in our lives of today. It is in the air, the feeling of danger that always stalks any émigré, which in her poetry takes on the shape of the desolation caused by war. "Please, leave me alone, Romania / 1 want to start / Living," she writes. But even if this could ever be accomplished, it is the war that will remain with the poet as our common legacy, of yesterday and today. Irena Grudzinska Gross is director of the Institute for Human Sciences andprofessor ofmodernforeign languages at Boston University. Her books include Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky: Magnetic Field (Krakow) and The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination (1991) which had several editions in four languages, including Rumanian. Wozu Dichter.. Christian Moraru Lucräri in verde SAU PlEDOARIA MEA PENTRU POEZIE Simona Popescu Cartea Romaneascä http://www.cartearomaneasca.ro 336 pages; paper, 32.90 RON "What are poets for in a time ofneed," Friedrich Hölderlin asked two hundred years ago. Why bother to read poems at a moment of want or crisis, when it appears that we have more urgent things to take care of? More to the point: why even raise these questions "m dürftiger Zeit"! Published by the Bucharest press Cartea Romaneascä in 2006, Simona Popescu's latest book of poems, Lucräri in verde sau Pledoaria mea pentru poezie/Works in Green, or My Defense ofPoetry , with a wink at the Sir Philip Sidney-Percy Bysshe Shelley tradition, asks these questions throughout its three hundred pages over and over again. Nor does it do it for the first time in its author's career. In a culture at pains to come to terms with its "crisis" openly following the fall of communism, Simona Popescu has been among those who have formulated these interrogations as much as they have suggested answers constantly, ever since her first poetry book came out in 1 990 (Xilofonul si alte poeme/The Xylophone and Other Poems). Where the fate of and the faith in poetry are concerned, all we can do is suggest answers, hint at possibilities, venture a guess. Or so it seems. For recent Romanian literature— what Romanian critics aptly identify as a postmodernism sans "late capitalism"—is, across genres, remarkably bookish and self-reflective. It has brought its world, sources, and ultimately itself into question, has scrutinized the pre- and post- 1989 political status quo as well as its own...