About 47 Poems:
...In her mournful, beautiful poems, full of tears that do not solace, Flavia Cosma expresses her anguish over the spiritual desolation, brought about, if I read her startling metaphors rightly, by the unavoidable cruelties of life in her unfortunate country. Hers are poems that apply as well to us, whose society, richer perhaps, but with democratic traditions increasingly more tarnished, is afflicted with the same callousness toward our fellow man. There is no escaping, these poems remind us, the stifling atmosphere of the oppression -- spiritual, political, economic - most of mankind suffers from.
Edward Field
...Passionate and concise, Flavia Cosma's remarkable lyrics take place upon some moonlit landscape transfixed by lightning bolts. In Don Wilson's facing translations, we see her poems as in a magic mirror: one that retains the very shape and even some of the sound of the original, rendering beautifully clear and familiar what had been strange and inaccessible before. This book is a splendid achievement, a first breakthrough into Romanian poetry for most of us Americans.
X.J. Kennedy
There are no rest stops in Flavia Cosma's poetry. The magnetic field of her word choices conveys movement, physical as well as emotional movement, into realms where logic can no longer provide answers to the questions that the poet is driven to ask. She tries to populate the garden of her imagination with birds, flames and waves, but the migration ends often in sorrow and loneliness. At times, she looks for moments of repose in the fantasy world of dreams, yet return to the grief and ashes of the daily world remains inescapable: "Green dreams that never found the sea / Stray on poisonous lakes."
Flavia Cosma tastes the sensuousness of words. She creates through an endless chain of paradoxical juxtapositions and through the rhythmic structures of her language a poetic reality that transcends momentarily the dark human existence of which these words speak.
Rainer Schulte