I think an anthology of poetry is an expedition in search of the golden thread. The shores of poetry are unknown, in the sense that they appear, they are revealed, when the dream state surpasses everyday reality. Otherwise, anchoring in a reality as a port without any opening, without access to the sea, would keep us captive in it. At the ideological level, the Poet's Ship is an archetype of a ship, which can be called by the same ancient name, "Argo".
On the other hand, the new reality, as a revitalized form of social, artistic neorealism, is delivered in poetry "in bitcoin", as verbal currency at universal standards, a term used excellently by Ruben Bucoiu, one of the poets of this anthology. In other words, Dumitru Baluta talks about the "jellyfish of reality" in a struggle of ideas with the "earthquakes of the imagination".
In almost all the poems in this anthology there are white spaces of the imagination, finally covered by reality. The relationship between them works alternately, by rotation.
The music from the romantic poetry written by Calin Ioan Acu, the love with the stories of the heart, are part of a night dream. "And the moon leaves me / your face asleep to love it", says the author.
We also find love stories of the heart in Mihai Tanase's poetry. Here is a verse that can hardly be overlooked: "I was blinded by looking into your soul." The five poems by Mihai Tanase in this anthology are five grams of "snow", meaning five grams of "pure heroin".
Personal biographies, fragmented by writing or confession, become cultural biographies in a book. Madalina Aldescu's poetry is one such example. The poet of the last generation or next generation, with an accentuated personal note, with poetry titles that say everything in one breath, she asks questions to the society in which she lives, where beings are absorbed by statistics. "A house is nothing but a hungry being" is just one of the titles of his poems. And the "Stockholm Syndrome" he talks about in another poem is a planetary syndrome.
Although they are part of society, in their own way, although they live in big cities or provincial towns, say, for example, the city of Zalau, a city that eats paper, as the poet Doru Vasile Butuza says in the poem "Modernization", the poets they remain the absolute solitude of an afternoon, in an "empty city".
There is a meeting point, a point of convergence between their poems, whether they are love, melancholic, religious or about nature, as in the haiku poems of Nicolae Crepcia, a melancholy of longing for the mountains full of "flowers in prayer" or seeking God. Cornel C. Costea calls this meeting place "summer without a name" as an ideal landmark for the passage of time, and Issabela Cotelin, through a question, suggests the place of this meeting, "At the old church / From a village edge?" .
The poets of this anthology have various trades, concerns, ideals, jobs ... They emphasize various everyday realities or meta-realities and play with their own ideals. The "window of the heart", about which Iulia Dragomir writes, is just one of the places, among many others, from where you can look at the feast of the world, after which you return to the "Book" where the first Word was written.
Dan Fripis's "Autumn Anxieties" has a complementary answer in Veronica Leca's confession, in "Self-Portrait with Two Wings Tied to the Shoulder" or in Daniela Toma's "silent film" excerpts. Somewhere, among them, we find the "miracle of emptiness" in which Stela Ember floats "without hitting the birds ...".
Ionut Manea's mini-poems, with characters from a possible meta-animal theater, where Lice, Prostitute, Dream, Misery and the list can go on - are part of the "Games of the world on the stall of a market".
What else do we find on this stall?
A dictionary of foreign languages, known by heart by Monica Manolachi, or the "soft wind" that accompanies Mona Motorga's untitled poems, or only their echo, as an "echo of the rain" that spreads in the poems signed by Tania Nicolescu. The baggage of words, in such a journey, includes for Mihaela-Angela Stan emotions mixed in a stable balance.
We were talking above about the daily concerns of poets, about their jobs, about the influence that, perhaps, they have on their work.
Simona Stapan says in a biographical note several times: "Corporate and I like it!". Then let's look, if there is one, for the corporate connections in her poems! I did not find any, but only a retro happiness and "straitjacket" which can be called love and which can have the "weight of a drowsiness".
The nuances of everyday, social, artistic reality, in an infinite range of poetic decodings, have various references. Tatiana Stoicescu chooses those of surrealism, and Lorena Stuparu chooses those of the "like" message sent to all.
There is a Japanese poet, Saito Fumi, considered the "queen of tanka poetry." He lived to be 93 years old and wrote about cherry blossoms, about mud, about his blind mother who cared, about the breast surgery she underwent, about the Imperial Palace where she was twice received by the Emperor of Japan ..., about love, about the snow coming from the sky, as a release.
I remembered her, reading in this anthology, the first poem in the group signed by Andreea Tanase, about another kind of release.
Writing frees you. Writing therapy is not easy. It's like a trip to the dream shore ...
Clelia Ifrim