My Native Land A4 by Ana Blandiana

Abstract

tree”; neither has she, speaking openly about not having children. Like the bat who is “crippled [she is] determined / to survive,” and she is not afraid of it, as women living alone often are. She enjoys good-looking waiters but is shocked by the tattooed body of a waitress who is “a work of art,” rejecting the unfamiliar aspects of youth. Still, sexuality intrigues her, and she slips in an erotic poem, “Make Me Vera Wang,” about “Designer vaginas [which] are all the rage / . . . in Hollywood!” Living alone can be dangerous; one could slip and fall, feel helpless , unable to reach anyone for help. “Close Call” bruises are a reminder of what could have happened. “Detours” laments that she can’t buy a sports car as she has never learned to drive a stick shift; her fantasy will remain unfulfilled. She asks for “a table for one” at a Comfort Inn. Still, she doesn’t feel resentment toward men and doesn’t “want to destroy them,” like a snake. Using the third person, she distances herself from the poems, but she is still speaking about herself, as in “Still Life Is Red,” in which a woman who is listening to a cardinal asks, “Did she want those birds to be / the last thing she laid eyes on?”—in a way anticipating what’s to come after she dies, “a summer day scattered / with sunflowers. Blooming without her.” She ends the book with an elegy in which she mourns the dead who will never return to their familiar people and places. With these poems Grace Bauer solidifies her status as a spiritual, feminist, and mature poet. Biljana D. Obradović Xavier University of Louisiana Ana Blandiana. My Native Land A4. Paul Scott Derrick & Viorica Pâtea, tr. Hexham, Northumberland. Bloodaxe (Dufour, distr.). 2014. isbn 9781780371054 Readers coming belatedly to the work of Ana Blandiana may be puzzled at the disconnect between the introduction provided by her translators and the poems in this volume. It is true, as translators Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Pâtea say, that Blandiana was one of the leading Romanian dissidents against the Communist regime, and thereafter was a strong voice for democratic principles (see WLT, Nov. 2014, 38–39). But the poems that deal at all with freedom do so in ways which are philosophical rather than political, putting the speaker and by extension all humanity in spaces that are enclosed, with no or illusory exits. The poems often use a religious vocabulary : angels, gods, churches, and more abstract terms like guilt, innocence, faith. Occasionally the speaker challenges God, or a god; more often that voice addresses the simultaneous innocence and guilt of humans fixed in a situation they can try to understand but cannot hope to alter in what, in one poem, Blandiana calls “the country of unease.” That applies not just to physical and metaphysical situations but to language, for in “Amber” the poet is “Like a dragonfly trapped in an amber cell— / This luminous crypt of words.” This and other poems support the generalizations in Blandiana’s manifesto in the afterword, where she says that striving for perfection is inevitable but inevitably doomed. Elsewhere in the afterword, Blandiana calls for “a poetry so simple, clean, and transparent that it doesn’t even seem to be there.” That helps to account for the style of these poems, where declarative sentences in a vocabulary that is not quite limited to abstract and general terms cohere into a series of assertions. Some of these, as in “Group Portrait,” seem to assert conclusions that the rest of the poem either does not support or hammers too hard, rather like the concluding couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet. But such is the risk which this kind of poetry, sparer than that of Thomas Hardy and others, seems not only willing but destined to take. Nicholas Mosley Metamorphosis Dalkey Archive Press This philosophical yet quietly intense novel by British author Nicholas Mosley explores the variety of elements that may influence the development of the individual in the context of family and society. The story itself travels from Ireland to East Africa in its quest for connections and reveals some basic truths...