The Sky Behind the Forest: Selected Poems

In the summer of 1992 a recently widowed Tess Gallagher sat with Liliana Ursu beneath an apple tree in a village near Bucharest when, in a preternatural moment, a secret word from Ursu's childhood sprang from Gallagher's lips. That fall, on a jet from Romania to New York , Gallagher sat next to Adam Sorkin, who has translated the work of over 50 Romanian poets, and they read through the spare, despairing yet inspiring manuscript that only now, half a decade later, reaches the bookshelf in a polished, vigorous form. Ursu's translated voice is one of a deep sadness that refuses to turn cynical, displaying a modest bravery in the face of political and personal strife and demonstrating a resplendent feminism. Mostly, however, she articulates a hunger laid out in elemental imagery, evoking a spirit that craves, though not often finds, redress: ""In the city of what once was, I repaired clocks,/ and high in the tower I set the heavy iron hand/ to the fragile hours. / You would pick wild strawberries from the lip of the abyss./ A word, and we came crashing down."" Knife blades cut into both the expansive sky and a caught fish in a world so large and so small as to hold Bucharest and Pennsylvania (Ursu taught at Penn State in 1992) on a single page. The attentions of Ursu, Gallagher and Sorkin seem to add an additional dimension of complexity and illumination to these poems. (June)