Angel Riding a Beast (Writings From An Unbound Europe) - Softcover

Ursu, Liliana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810116596 ISBN 13: 9780810116597

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 1998

Synopsis

The poems in Angel Riding a Beast are the stunning expression of the Romanian poet Liliana Ursu's years in America. The sadness and paradoxes of exile and the clarity of a cross-cultural awareness become for Ursu the psychological and descriptive framework for poems infused with the emotion and images of erotic longing and spiritual loneliness. The combination of elegy and wit in the poems of Ovid, the poet of exile with whom Ursu claims kinship, is evident in her poetry as well. Always conscious of both her new American freedom and the remorselessness of time and death, Ursu explores the American landscape through "the sad aura of those coming from Eastern Europe / as if from some kind of inferno." She displays remarkable insight into America's often formless and shallow "society of consumers," and yet her newly Americanized vision also allows her to reimagine and reevaluate her life and her country. The alienating repression of recent Romanian history has led Romanian poets, with Ursu as a source of inspiration for their almost violent intensity of language, to resist and penetrate all boundaries and limits, whether political, ideological, or aesthetic. The sympathy of her cultural observations and the physicality of her poetic images and the desires that inform them give Ursu's poems an affecting and universal perspective in which disperate experience and places coalesce in a singular human landscape.

About this title

About the Author

Liliana Ursu was born in 1949 in Bucharest, Romania, and was educated in French and English at Bucharest University. She has published seven books of poetry and two books of short stories. In 1997, her book of poetry The Sky behind the Forest was published in an English translation by Bloodaxe Press. In 1992 and 1997, she was a Fulbright Fellow at Pennsylvania State University. She currently produces a weekly literary program for the Cultural Department of Romanian National Radio.

Bruce Weigl teaches in the writing program at Pennsylvania State University and is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently What Saves Us  (1992) and Sweet Lorain (1996), both published by TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern University Press.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Romanian

About this edition

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0810116596
• ISBN 13: 9780810116597
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 75