Description: "The Shadow of Words covers Blandiana's early collections published from 1964 to 1981, as well as including uncollected poems from that period which only appeared in anthologies. It follows My Native Land A4 (2014), The Sun of Hereafter - Ebb of the Senses (2017) and Five Books (2021) in completing Bloodaxe's presentation of Blandiana's collected poems to date in English translation. She published these poems during the brief period of political thaw of Romania's communist regime, when aestheticism took on a more subversive role, reaffirming the autonomy of the poetic word and freeing it from the stultifying demands of propagandist proletarian art"--
Review Quotes:
'Romanian author and political activist Blandiana enthrals in this anthology of her early work. Fidelity to truth, ethical inquiry, union with nature, and the ubiquity of the soul underscore narratives that resuscitate awe and riot against passivity [...] With nonpareil enlightenment, valor, and spectral beauty, Blandiana's visions make an indelible impression.' - Publishers Weekly, starred review of The Shadow of Words
'This searching for shadows establishes the conditions for her brilliant career, of which the primary feature is a startling direct refusal of lyric rhetoric, combined with a startling and intimate structural organization. [...] the poet's early work invites us precisely to inhabit a place where violence is projected toward comfortable states of self-consciousness, where every trace becomes a wound, and where memory is necessary or unavoidable because it remains incomplete. Pain is intensified here, as is isolation, violence, self-consciousness--but also acceptance, persistence, and liberation.' - Charles Altieri, Asymptote, on The Shadow of Words
'In the tradition of Anna Akhmatova and Václav Havel, Blandiana bears witness to eastern European history while also offering visionary and meditative verse in the spirit of Emily Dickinson and Rainer Maria Rilke... Thanks to Derrick and Patea's faithful rendering of Blandiana's formal innovations in light of the poems' evolving context, Five Books will ensure Blandiana's legacy as a poet with international significance.' - J. Rhett Forman, World Literature Today, on Five Books
'Blandiana is a pure lyricist, focused entirely on the event of how imagination finds words and rhythms that make certain mental experiences memorable. Her poems characteristically achieve strange precisions by having pervasive metaphors unfold her sense of "sacred void" as negative plenitude.' - Charles Altieri, UC at Berkeley
'The Romanian Ana Blandiana is one of Europe's greatest living poets, and she's well served by this substantial volume containing five previously untranslated collections. Ranging across her writing life, they create a layered portrait of a complex yet consistent poetic identity.' - Fiona Sampson, The Guardian, on Five Books
'... one of Europe's most important living poets. Blandiana is not concerned with elegant artifice. Her poems are mostly short in line and in length. And the voice, one of the most remarkable features of her work, is simple, calm and intimate... Yet that voice is capable of surprising and resonant shifts of focus that at times produce brilliant perspectives on her political situation, on her efforts to understand what connections are possible to spiritual forces, and late in her career on the various ways love can pervade life.' - Charles Altieri, The London Magazine, on Five Books