Lightwall

by Liliana Ursu, Sean Cotter (Translator)

“Liliana Ursu’s poems are like flowers at the edge of the abyss. They are beautifully clear and precise, but behind them one glimpses the presence of an ineradicable dark.”—Mark Strand

“Ursu writes poetry that is wild and unpredictable, on the brink of flying away beyond real and imagined borders. Her short poems are stunning, unforgettable, and expertly translated into exciting English texts by Sean Cotter.”—Ray Gonzalez

Lightwall refers to the angled casements built to reflect sunlight into basement apartments in Bucharest. These poems bring light where it ordinarily does not reach: Romanian trains, old suitcases, the medieval city where Ursu was born. Her poems connect her home in old Bucharest to her travels in the United States, and her Orthodox spirituality with her modern, Balkan context.

“Snapshot”

About dill, tarragon, and Ibiza
I cannot write the same way.
About jets, juniper, and January
I can.

About roundhouses, surroundings, and sleigh bells
the only ones who write the same
are hills and angels.

Liliana Ursu is a poet, prose writer, and translator. She has published seventeen books in Romania and three have been translated into English. Ursu produces radio programs in Bucharest, has received two Fulbright grants to teach at Penn State, and has also taught creative writing at the University of Louisville, Kentucky.

Sean Cotter has translated four books of Romanian poetry, including Zephyr’s volume of Liliana Ursu’s poetry, Goldsmith Market (2004).

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2009

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

[Arnoldo Garcia · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Lightwall" by Liliana Ursu. translated beautifully (actually traversed) by Sean Cotter, opens a new page in the interaction and inter-marriage of languages. Our history becomes stories that unfurl a ground beneath our eyes and a wind upon our banners of invisibility.

This bi-lingual presentation and translation of a seemingly itinerant Romanian poeta Liliana Ursu makes me want to learn Romanian. Listening to "Ce gradiini de femei" sends shivers into the spine of my memory. On the page through my mestizo tongue, Romanian sounds close to the mixture of spanish-brazilian-pocho (pocho, in its original Nahuatl significance, meaning an ambassador of culture and a representative of the community whose duty is to travel and meet the other community, dialogue) that I speak, think, act and read.

Lilianaa Ursu lives and writes in more than one world, that is why she is, just like me, a pocha-poeta.

[Bryn Cavin · Rating 5 out of 5]

“So much heaven has turned his shoes blue.”

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5