It is said that a “sketch”, a very short story, is a test for a prose writer.
I think that also, for a poet, a haiku poem or a poem in a line is a test to find a touchstone in his/her poetry.
The book “Ireductibil / Irreducible” by Paula Bârsan, a book with a rich message of the poem in a line, and other poems, has all the chances to be considered a touchstone in her poetry.
The poem in a line is a Romanian native poetry, and it was created by Ion Pillat (1891 - 1945), the most famous poet of this poetry form.
Ştefan G. Theodoru, a Romanian writer who lived for many years in America, in his book “Freamăt /Rustle” names this poem “Romanian liner” and also writes about the difference between a haiku and a poem in a line:
“I would like to remind my readers that although there is a resemblance between the Romanian liner and haiku, the first is totally different from the second. (...) Broadly speaking, considering that haiku brings us a perception within the limit of a second, the Romanian liner arises from a spark born from individual conception and impression of the surrounding world and/or by the personal, inner poet’s universe.”
The book by Paula Bârsan, set under a motto from a science-fiction novel by Isaac Asimov, has an architecture of the remains of thoughts, coagulating old living experiences. “ Sincerity had long boots, red nails.”, Paula Bârsan writes in the poem „The Remains of Ambiguity”.
Her poems in a line can be read and understood through a grid of concise definitions for an illusory experience. “Goldening hexagons,” she says in another poem, and this means to obey a technical language of the hydraulic press ‒ compasses, rose wind, nanosecond ‒trying to adapt it to the poetic emotion of love or the natural things.
In the poem “ Blanc”, the emotional definition touches the white threshold of the non-description:
„The freshness of mornings, morphinic white.”
From the politics of the money market to the Romanian melancholy Doina song, from the “dress with red petunias” to the “traffic of heresies”, the technology of the image is sometimes one of the “pagan” things.
The poems in a line by Paula Bârsan belong to the author's predisposition, to her proclivity to unreel a movie about the combination of the elements in a love story.
The motto from a science-fiction by Isaac Asimov points to the word chemistry of combinations, which is associated with love. Through a poetic artifice, „The arrived letter hydraulically dries out a cloud”.
In the second part of “Ireductibil / Irreducible”, the poems are written in an easier form of restful essences to develop the primary image.
The intermittent rhythm, the verbal beat from the book's first part, vanishes, and a wave of a free wish occurs. “The palm full of tacks”, as a symbol of the sweetheart, becomes in the second part of the book by Paula Bârsan a self-knowledge reference, a reference to the open questions:
„Cold glances are melting bricks.
Lost is the magnetic compass
Looking for yourself on the way,
Inside the hermitages of kiss
There is no blue.”
Clelia Ifrim