Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Poetic Voices: Lucia Cherciu and Sarah Nichols


Poets have been writing about exile at least as far back as Ovid’s exile to the Romanian coast of the Black Sea by the Emperor Caesar Augustus in 8 A.D. “Our native soil draws all of us,” he wrote in one poem, “by I know not what sweetness, and never allows us to forget.” Exile is about both the present moment and memory, and about both simultaneously.

Two recent collections of poems explore the idea of exile, but they do it in very different ways.

Lucia Cherciu is a professor of English at the State University of New York in Dutchess/Poughkeepsie. She was born in Romania, and in fact has had two collections of poetry published there -- The Abandonment of Language (2009) and Gifted Laughter (2010), both by Editura Vinea Press in Bucharest. She writes in both English and Romanian, and her first book of poetry in English, Edible Flowers, was published in 2015.


To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

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