Stained glass windows in summer light

Functioning like a two-sided mirror, one side of which magnifies the image without distorting it, the poetry collection Stained Glass in Summer Light, written “by four poetic hands,” portrays a universe of inner, geographical, and emotional distance that is as fascinating as it is fragile. The confessional lyrical journey of the two authors, Dorian Stoilescu and Loredana Tudor-Tomescu, continuously intertwines and unravels, winding its way through similar yet distinct experiences, tormenting emotions, impetuous revolts, and shared hopes. Along the intricate, filigreed path of the verses, spatial and temporal dimensions lose their rigidity: countries, cities, bridges, streets, tunnels, and memories blend together in the mixer of memory, giving birth to mundane refuges dreaming of the robustness of sacred constructions.

The poems explore in detail the fragility of the human condition and the difficulty of finding stability in a world marked by mobility, loneliness, and identity-related uncertainty. Within the glazed space of uncertainty, love appears ambivalent — at once salvific and painful — projecting itself from a bitter past (“The most terrible foreignness is that of your heart / passing by mine every day”) toward a future of yearning (“The sand within me still believes in love and in the loyalty of a Labrador”).

Equally provocative and captivating is the challenge of identifying the author behind the deliberately unsigned verses, although the simmering feminine voice and the blunt masculine one often emerge between the lines. Yet the reader who allows themselves to be drawn into the game (or absorbed by the mirror’s sheen) will undoubtedly feel rewarded in the end. For through the honeyed light of summer filtering across the stained glass of the past, one can glimpse “a healing at both ends of the wound.”

— Mădălina Firănescu