The Sky Behind the Forest

When the Ceaucescu regime was toppled, Liliana Ursu was able to give readings abroad. The American poet Tess Gallagher heard her in Spain, and was stunned. Not since ?rst hearing Anna Akhmatova's poetry read in translation twenty years before had she encountered 'a woman's voice so carnivorous and tender, majestic and human... Her poems yielded a humanly political veracity which did not accede to cynicism, but seemed to have witnessed with a clear gaze what had befallen her country, its people.'

'She writes from a religious soul and the sustaining elements of her poems arise from ritual and humility, from tenacious, mindful suffering and deeply held religious practices and belief. Her voice is impetuous and full of a rushing audacity that can stab the consciousness by suddenly becoming stark and acute. The spectrum of Liliana Ursu's poetic reach combines the sensual and spiritual, the personal with the historical, the mythical with the daily. The jaundiced contemporary heart, closed to miracles and scant of the religious, may at least be persuaded to pause, to glimpse another world, when confronted with these poems.'