I know that she has been publishing books in English for a while now, but I am often slow to catch onto things; only recently did I discover the work of Liliana Ursu, but now she (along with another Romanian poet, Ileana Malancioiu) is one of my favorites.
I discovered Ursu when I was writing an essay this summer about American poet and short story writer Tess Gallagher. Gallagher, along with Adam Sorkin and Ursu herself, have translated two of Ursu’s books, The Sky Behind the Forest (published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK) and A Path to the Sea (Pleasure Boat Studio). Her other books in English include Goldsmith Market (reviewed in The Bloomsbury Review by Minnesota poet Ray Gonzalez) and Lightwall, both translated by Sean Cotter and published with Zephyr Press.
When I’m reading one of Ursu’s poems, especially for the first time, I often have a strange reaction; I find something inside me saying, ‘But this is the kind of poem you don’t like; why do you like it so much?’ Ursu’s “Poem with a Griffin, a Pike and Peacocks” begins with a first-person speaker telling us that she is reading poetry while it’s raining outside. Often I’m not fond of poems that begin in this way, as sometimes they offer a kind of passionless reportage, in which an “I” sitting and observing in the present tense is perhaps meant to replace the work of a real, breathing personality behind the poem, but doesn’t. Ursu’s poem isn’t like that. The fact that I’ve sat here most of the day trying to figure out why and not doing so well is the best part. She’s tapped into some kind of mystery that for the most part I can only helplessly enjoy.
I can explain a little about “Return to Sibiu.” The poem is luxuriously true to the ways in which we are, at any given moment, living in not only the physical circumstances we find ourselves in, but in all the places we’ve been and in all the places, and with all the people, we dream of (I can see why Tess Gallagher was attracted to Ursu’s work, as this is an idea she discusses at length in her essay collection A Concert of Tenses.) The speaker, returning to a house after a year away, sees and acknowledges concretely changes that have occurred there—perhaps some damage has been done to her paintings, a bird has taken up residence in her clock. But there is something so ephemeral about those images—the bird we can’t even see, it’s invisible, and the time it keeps, the speaker tells us, is invisible too—that perhaps we’re not even meant to take them literally. Who knows and who cares? The important thing is where they take us, in and out of present and past tense, to “she’s” and “I”s and “you”s literally present, present only in imagination or in the past, present somewhere right now, but not here—all seeming to speak to the passions and longings of this speaker alone in her feather-strewn house.
When violin music on a record brings the speaker to thoughts of a “you” who is far away, she finishes with an eight-line duet between the “I” and “you,” in which dresses and shoes and fingers and eyes speak back-and-forth to one another. In her use of musical terms like “presto” and “allegrezza,” understood by many a ten-year-old musician as dictates from the awesomely dead, to be followed without fail upon risk of pain and punishment from those emissaries from the dead, the teachers of their private lessons, Ursu instead uses the terms, alongside the descriptive “scherzo” and “gigue,” the way she wants to, in a kind of improvisatory call-and-response.
The poem has been in this way a search to find or invent the particular language that will express her feelings as finely and exactly and fully as she can. The language she’s chosen is all at once visual, aural, and imaginative; overwhelmed in all directions, I can’t help but feel I’m there.