Description: For the past 50 years, Dinescu has been one of Romanian poetry's most provocative and obstinately singular figures. After his first gratuitous exercises striving to commit himself to love poetry, he was surprised to discover that he had created poetry of sly political allusion. He was like that communist worker employed in a bicycle factory who, stealing a few nuts on one day, a few bolts or a gear on another, until finally realizing that however he assembled these parts, instead of a bicycle, the result was a machine gun. The dictator at whom Dinescu shot his metaphors was eventually shot with real bullets by his own henchmen. Dinescu jumps into and out of the handbook of literature, just as into and out of the handbook of history: in 1989, Dinescu was liberated from house arrest by a large crowd in Bucharest who carried him triumphantly to the national television building. There he announced to his country and the world that the dictator had fled. The country changed almost overnight from communist to capitalist, but Dinescu carried on doing what he'd always done: writing necessary poems that challenge all systems.
