Customer Reviews

Carpathia (American Poets Continuum)

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In Carpathia, Cecilia has once again given us her life transfigured. She's an alchemist who turns the metal of relationships and travels fiery with feeling, metaphor, and always the rightest and most stunning word, the unforseeable conclusion. In this collection, a number of familiar themes (grief, loss, passion, the plight of Eastern Europe) are to be found again, present, intense and lovely.

When we die and go to the next world, let us take these luminous poems with us to remind us just how exquisite it all was, the loss as well as the acquisition, and how we waited so steadfastly along the gaudy boulevards of commerce and down the low lit alleyways of love for someone to cast a light upon the walls of our heart. We follow the poet here on her journey toward meaning and understanding, and we arrive with her to see that it was our journey as well.

If forced to use only one word to describe Carpathia, that word would be "exquisite". Woloch's poems ahimmer and dance in my head, drawing me back again and again. She takes prose poetry to a dazzling height, leaving no doubt that these pieces are, indeed, poems. Her poetry is filled with love, loss, joy and longing.

Cecilia Woloch is a poet I like a lot because her poems touch me. Years ago, I wrote a short blog piece about the poems I like to read, good poems, and here's part of what I wrote:

"Someone asked me recently how I know what is good poetry and what isn't. There is the long story of what is good and the short story of what is good. The long story involves criteria and personal biography, the short story involves a simple statement. I'll give you the short story. What I feel is 'good' is what touches me."

Cecilia's new book Carpathia touches me.

I grew up hearing stories about the lives of people who started with nothing and ended up with nothing and spent most of their lives working for something, anything, that would feed the hunger that nothing brings. Sometimes they would find something and it would bring them joy. And sometimes it would bring them sorrow.

But the stories they told were never about the sorrow. They were about the search for joy or wisdom or friendship or love or honor that left the sorrow behind.

Cecilia's poems are like those stories. They take you by the hand and ask you to rest and breathe and listen to the songs in the wind, the voices from the past and the voices from faraway telling you their stories.