ANDREEA IULIA SCRIDON

“Line by artisanal line, her poet’s depth perception is better intuited as profound perception of depths, a cellular awareness of layer after layer of melancholy and despair, the endless excavations of pain’s interior geographies that paradoxically suffuse beauty and desire into the broken world. […] A Romanian Poem bursts with images and insights redolent of Czeslaw Milosz’s refined moods, radiant European afternoons of coffee, notebooks, good-natured debate among friends. Sophisticated sojourns along inner pathways, finding fruitful valence inside cartographies of stone or silence. She wields her pen like a cigarette at the Café du Dôme, utilizing the burning tip of her stylus to epitomize philosophical complexity, the elusive–yet vast–mercurial spirituality that thrums inside our shared human fragility.” —Michael Londra

“This young Oxford graduate reminds me overwhelmingly of an early Auden, and I think she has every chance of becoming the Auden of her time. Her intensity, her industriousness, her scientific passion, her lively and elemental belief in love, conspire to round out the Man of Letters. The name of the book is taken from an orchestral work by Romania’s greatest composer, a close friend of Andreea Iulia Scridon’s great-grandmother—an opera singer with whom Enescu performed for the King of Romania. Following her debut book, in her second language, Romanian, these poems in her native English tongue constitute a single whole poem: they find in the glory of an incident a dramatic portrait of a national character.” —Ben Mazer

“In A Romanian Poem Andreea Iulia Scridon has created a haunting and atmospheric cascade of scene and reflection. This is an impressive debut collection, shot through with sharp observation transformed by feeling and vivid association, a series of contemporary praise-songs and meditations on place and time, and on the relationship of journey and pilgrimage to hope and faith.” —Jane Draycott

“… Each poem layers past and present like successive coats of specially prepared plaster, sand, and marble dust onto a wall, in fresco…. Scridon brings selfhood into tension with memory and inheritance. In dialogue with the divine, the poet asks questions of empty chairs, and seeks answers to fill the inherited silences, or to build seraphim from the carapaces of old loves…. one is surrounded by both the sound and the horrible absence of sound, the reverb of circling echoes. If nothing feels substantial here, it is because substance is a material story, and loneliness isn’t concrete—it is ephemeral…. offering hues as unique as the blue of the Voroneț monastery or the cerulean of a Bucharest church. A Romanian Poem is a book that knows itself across the chasm of languages and borders, and its pulse is that of a wall, or a beloved buried inside a monastery wall in a myth that doubles as tribute and lament. I am holding it close. —Alina Stefanescu

“Andreea Iulia Scridon’s poetry attains emotional and verbal precision by letting the world play its music upon the subject’s well-tuned nervous system. Life—that bright amalgam of sense experience and soul experience—is preserved in the questioning, exploratory lines that it leaves on pages. Unmistakably, this poet has thrown in her lot with the noble poetic ambition that drives her poignant, softly spoken, subtly distinguished reflections.” —Philip Nikolayev

“The poetry volume attests to her pilgrim’s soul on several meridians, a kind of “dromedary” through the wide lands of Europe, but rather through the familiar ones of a contrasting Romania, where she searches for her origins and identity. I would say that wherever she might find herself, she returns here on the thread of memory, allowing herself to be invaded by the memories of a Cluj populated by close characters, by the always refreshed sequences of an interior eye, which never sleeps […] This memory of the concrete soaked with evanescence of an irrepressible past makes Andrea Iulia Scridon’s poetry an oasis of a lost time, which her memory returns to us with tenderness and delicacy.” —Mircea Popa

Andreea Iulia Scridon dives directly into the details of everyday life from which she joyfully extracts the banal. The balladeer element runs through his unusual tune, always adapted or dismantled, sometimes as an elegy, sometimes song, sometimes as lamentation, other times enchantment or invocation. The charm or charms offer phrases cross space and time, combining in a sui-generis formula the sacred with the profane and love with death. Laughter and dance, separation and joy become complementary forces of the postmodern soul, which passes through the experience of emigration. This volume offers an x-ray of the feminine soul drawn into the spider’s web of sunny Florida, always tempted by the whirlwind of heights or the deepest abyss. A repertoire that does not lack metamorphosis, wandering, nostalgia, exile.” —Andrei Mocuța

“The evocation of familiar spaces is done with a well-tempered pathos, without sentimentality. A frenetic imagism retains edifying details to define an atmosphere and environment that are lost in the fog of sentimental memory, the poet combining direct observation with exquisite bookish allusions. Following in the footsteps of her own past, the author proves to be a poet of substance, with a serious and profound vision of reality, with a literary expression full of finesse and refinement.” —Ion Cristofor

“… The author plays (she still has the ability to play, and she plays beautifully and seductively), hides, flirts with complicit naturalness and tells stories about cities, people, states of being – as endearing as they are pulverising in their intimate universe. These poems have a contagious energy and their author proves capable an exacerbated sense of detail: you can hear the whispers or shouts, touch the grass or the wood, you can catch a glimpse of the seraphim, you can smell the tomatoes or you can get lost in her Cismigiu Gardens or in utopian cities.” —Simona Preda

“The author plunges into everyday life with a dramatic halo, bathes the crowd through (re)lived objects & frames, immerses us in the interstices between ‘now’ and ‘then’, she is diaphanous, present, complicit, authentically sensitive, she writes as the evening falls over the day – always and unconsciously. I want more!” —Mihai Ivașcu