Am bucuria de a va anunta publicarea celui de-al patrulea volum de poezii al Claudiei Serea Nothing Important Happened Today la editura Broadstone Books din Frankfort, Kentucky.
Aceasta colectie de 148 de pagini e inspirata de strazile Bucurestiului din timpul Revolutiei din decembrie 1989 si de strazile New Yorkului vazute prin experienta emigrantului. Mai jos aveti descrierea completa si cateva cuvinte critice ale unor poeti americani cunoscuti.
Cartea se poate comanda direct de la editura: http://broadstonebooks.com/Claudia_Serea_Page.html
Like King Charles III’s apocryphal diary entry from July 4, 1776 from which this book takes its title, these poems remind us that it is only from the perspective of time and distance that we come to understand what is truly important in life. The life of poet Claudia Serea has taken her from the streets of Bucharest during the bloody overthrow of the Ceausescu regime through the experience of an immigrant in New York City and the tension and tangle of traveling back and forth between her native Romania and her newfound home in New Jersey, a life lived on the boundary between two lands, two languages, two cultures. And like the simple clothesline on the cover that in one poem relates a tragedy and in another the exquisite beauty of the mundane, Serea’s wondrously observant verse celebrates the potential in each moment, the revolutionary act of merely being alive.
Praise for Claudia Serea’s Nothing Important Happened Today:
“Readers are stepping into wry, lovely, and sometimes even tragic territory when they embark upon Claudia Serea’s new poetry collection, Nothing Important Happened Today. The idea of an ‘extraordinary ordinary’ pervades, beginning with the very first poem: ‘I part the night with both hands . . . Light moves across lawns,/over hydrangeas, zinnias, and yews . . . tangles in curtains/and hangs in hair./This ray has traveled 93 million miles/only to find/your unshaven face.’ The idea that illumination is looking for us, and that it may arrive in unexpected (even undesired) forms, is an underpinning for many of the poems. But there is another extraordinary ordinary pervading the work, and that is the daily life of a Romanian citizen in December 1989, the month that saw the execution by firing squad of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. After that horror, there is hope: ‘At noon, the radio will say how deep is the Danube/in Romanian, Russian, and French,/and Grandma will wait on the porch,/chicken soup ready,/beds made./And the road will be long,/summer short, /perfect fishing weather/on its way.’ In the section ‘The Greatest City on Earth,’ readers are presented with the extraordinarily ordinary New York, post 9-11: ‘. . .beautiful, carnivorous city . . . Take my life and bury it/inside your towers,/and bloom on Top of the Rock/a vivid flower.’ Serea presents New York to us like Marina Tsvetaeva presented Moscow to Osip Mandelstam in the second part of her 1916 poem, ‘Verses About Moscow.’ In both poems, the deliciousness one savors when tasting the city is tinged with the bitterness of uncertainty; it is on that fulcrum that many of Serea’s poems pivot and come to rest. Reading her beautifully crafted work, you may often feel like the images were being delivered directly to you, as a gift of light, from light. And you’d be right.”
—Sharon Mesmer, author of Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place
“Claudia Serea’s Nothing Important Happened Today might echo Auden’s famous assertion about how poetry survives in the valley of its own making, but in this case, quotidian life encompasses everything from mortality and immigration to the merest crumble of cinnamon bark. Serea masterfully takes us from a dictatorship in Romania to the green pastures and blind neon signs of Times Square, from Orion’s belt to a Buick dealership in East Rutherford, her poems illuminated by a characteristic grace and a paradoxical gentleness fierce in its intensity of perception. ‘Danube, Danube,’ one of the poem strums, ‘this song is for you and me’; how lucky we are to be part of this sublime and flowing music.”
—Ravi Shankar, Pushcart Prize winning poet and Founding Editor of Drunken Boat
“A lovely freshness and a lyric frankness direct this collection as it acknowledges the imperatives of history, on the one hand, and the irrepressibility of the present moment, on the other—finding the light, the life, in both. As its title indicates, it offers an occasion to reconsider our priorities and to focus on the intricacies and intimacies that we often pass over. It’s a text built of the complexities of a life that has traveled from communist-era Bucharest to post-9/11 New York; its humanity is irrepressible—and so generously shared.”
—Cole Swensen, author of Noise That Stays Noise
