Angel Riding a Beast

by Liliana Ursu, Bruce Weigl (Translator)

The poems in Angel Riding a Beast are the stunning expression of the Romanian poet Liliana Ursu's years in America. The sadness and paradoxes of exile and the clarity of a cross-cultural awareness become for Ursu the psychological and descriptive framework for poems infused with the emotion and images of erotic longing and spiritual loneliness. The combination of elegy and wit in the poems of Ovid, the poet of exile with whom Ursu claims kinship, is evident in her poetry as well. Always conscious of both her new American freedom and the remorselessness of time and death, Ursu explores the American landscape through "the sad aura of those coming from Eastern Europe / as if from some kind of inferno." She displays remarkable insight into America's often formless and shallow "society of consumers," and yet her newly Americanized vision also allows her to reimagine and reevaluate her life and her country. The alienating repression of recent Romanian history has led Romanian poets, with Ursu as a source of inspiration for their almost violent intensity of language, to resist and penetrate all boundaries and limits, whether political, ideological, or aesthetic. The sympathy of her cultural observations and the physicality of her poetic images and the desires that inform them give Ursu's poems an affecting and universal perspective in which disperate experience and places coalesce in a singular human landscape.

Genres: Poetry, Romania

75 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Liliana Ursu, internationally acclaimed Romanian poet, was born in Sibiu, Romania. Ursu has published eight books of poetry in Romanian. Her first book in English, The Sky Behind the Forest (Bloodaxe Books, 1997), translated by Ursu, Adam J. Sorkin, and Tess Gallagher, became a British Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and was shortlisted for Oxford's Weidenfeld Prize. Ursu's poetry has also been translated by her with Bruce Weigl and by Sean Cotter. Her most recent volume is Lift Up Your Hearts (Bucharest, Eminescu Publishing House, 2002). Sorkin and Gallagher, in collaboration with Ursu, are readying a second book of her poems in English, to be entitled A Path to the Sea. During 1992-93 and again in 1997-98, Ursu was a Fulbright Lecturer at Penn State's University Park campus; in spring 2000 she served as a visiting professor of creative writing at the University of Louisville. In fall 2003, she was Poet-in-Residence at the Stadler Center for Poetry, Bucknell University. Ursu has worked for Romanian National Radio since 1980, producing a literary magazine of the air.

Reviews

[Gillian K · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had a few good lines

[Hesper]

And the Romanian title is?

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a lot of religious themes and references which sometimes bored me because that is so common in poetry.