About Fata Morgana
...One must thank the obviously exquisitely attentive Wilson for transferring into an English both unforced and unforgettable the disciplined, searing simplicity of Cosma's diction and the dark, hallucinatory cast of her imagery. As in her previous collections, one finds here conjoined the fantastic and the macabre, the mystical and the Gothic. In Cosma's poetry, the experienced 'innocence' one associates with William Blake must always surrender to the malevolent sorrow exemplified by Edgar Allan Poe.
I seek to understand - and to help you appreciate - the sturdy excellence of Cosma's work, which is composed of both of the ether of Heaven and the murk of Hell. Her Paradise requires aery intelligence; our planet demands erotic sensuousness. So, her work sings of warring elements: earth, fire, water, love, hate, life, death. She is, unabashedly a bardic poetess, a floribunda philosophe, a soul singer-seer.
"I'm returning home on the road without moons,
I stride sweating as under a spell,
Traps like skeletons are springing in my way
And the slippery breathing is hitting the nape of my neck.
This is the hour when I remember to pray...,
My heart all balled up in my lap,
Among forests of unholy ghosts,
I arise from fear as from a disease."
Flavia Cosma: Fata Morgana: The reality is the poet.
George Elliot Clarke
University of Toronto
A Few Words Of Comment on Flavia Cosma's Fata Morgana
Flavia Cosma's poetry has a universal, timeless character, while being contemporary at the same time. It notably speaks of feelings and ideas that do not come up to our expectations, but it also carries an undercurrent of hope for their return and fulfillment. Its intensity is always controlled by the need for precision which bans from these poems gentle phrases that would bring along an abstract serenity. The poet seems to be saying, 'We live in a time of unceasing tensions.' To quote from one of the poems from this new volume, "The Knife": 'With a knife in my breast, I walk through the world./People/Begrudge me a crust of bread--/Dogs are tearing apart/My loves.// But my heart feels only the sorrow.'
One of the prevailing themes in Flavia Cosma's poetry is love, but not as a banal, run-of-the-mill experience. Instead, it has the elemental intensity of natural phenomena, which best picture both the breakdown of feelings and the undying hope. And that's where the poet places her wise optimism. As in the poem "I Will Return." 'The moon slips like a teardrop/Over the stone arm,/The summer is sick from unmowed grass--/Fate is waiting.//Until then,/Until the time arrives,/For a long time I look at you, from this old wound,/And the blood runs at our feet/Continuously, in lieu of words. Love permanently remains in Flavia's poetry at the stage of a fresh wound that does not heal and is not meant to heal, for the poet keeps hoping for a new encounter, love's absence being only symbolic, as in the poem meaningfully titles "Absence." 'From absence to absence/I drowned in the colour of your eyes--/Blue desires--in the well of oblivion./I dispersed whispers, butterflies,/Into February's windy breath/And I clasped your hands together/On breasts of ice.//And today, when I look/Towards the mouths of the river,/Snow still falls from your words, Like a feeble light through branches,/Like a far-off sign,/A shy denial.
The nature, playing such an important role in Flavia's poetry, is not only a metaphor for the power of the author's feelings, but also a scenery in which these feelings life, breathe, flourish. The baroque opulence of her diction is worthy of a genuine master of the word.
Irena Harasimowicz-Zarzecka, Ph.D.
Author of an Anthology of 67 modern Rumanian poets in Polish translation, Warsaw 1989