Raluca Maria Ganciu is in her second published book. The first is a book of short prose, published this year by Bifrost Publishing House, entitled Nepovestiri.
From those that cannot be told to those that can only be told in front of the mirror, it is a road, a migratory bird's path. For Raluca Maria Ganciu, this is a road of roosters.
There is a Japanese legend, more a real fluid than a story, where it is said that migratory birds, when they leave for warm countries, take with them a wooden board, and keep it in their beak. When they are above the oceans, and are tired of so much flight, they release this wooden plank into the water, sit on it, resting, and at the same time, floating on.
Raluca Maria Ganciu is an incurable melancholy, and I don't see why it would be otherwise.
It is her native state as a man and a poet. It is its first source of identity or in terms of digital literature, this melancholy is part of the data through which it can be identified.
In the poem Zbor he says it clearly, with a neutral and beneficial feeling of detachment:
On the shore of a lake, crossed by the weather,
Next to a poplar handcuffed by crows,
On a cold stone that hugs me,
It's me, Raluca.
And the reference for the flight, or what's left of it, is part of the arsenal of identification portraits. And it is not a robot portrait, or an avatar, but a very personal, vivid one, pushing the imagination beyond the edge of the eternal night.
In the poem Sac cu plene we find another identity of the poet, remade from dreams, bird wings, darkness ...
With his hand on the embers,
With a sewn smile,
I lock myself in the feather bag,
With a silent zipper.
Far from the very colorful noise of modern poetry, far from the telephone chatter with pretensions of poetry, the tones of charcoal or ink, black and white, with silver iridescence, create for the author, a space only hers. The poetry in this book is found only in fluid spaces like the waters of a mirror, in which the flame of a candle flickers easily. It is a poetic framework par excellence, but also a domestic, familiar setting, an everyday ambiance in black and white. Maybe it is a self-exile, an imposed exile, a refusal to participate in the noise of the world. The smooth, slightly sleepy spaces, the swaying poplars, outline a third dimension of the poet: foreign.
There is a slowness in the poetry of Exile, a diffusion of the real world in the one subject to sleep.
I'm coming back from the shadows of the masts
let me sing you a song of sleep.
I wondered where he was coming from, where he was coming from, what was going on there, beyond the flight, beyond the mirror, beyond the confession:
I'm the girl in the mirror.
Maybe the legend of the roosters we were talking about at the beginning, can tell us more about the girl who looks in the mirror, and who brings with her a rooster's feather. It is the answer beyond this book, where the last verse speaks of life, as of the flock of roosters that never returns.
And yet, someone returns, carrying in his hand, as a symbol of flight, a rooster's feather. And looking in the mirror again, he can say like a new one: confession I am the rooster that has returned.
Clelia Ifrim