The God's Orbit, Aura Christi translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Petru Iamandi. Paperback, 74 pp. ISBN 978-1-869848-26-2. £8.99. 29 Oct 2020.
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Aura Christi is a romantic in classic disguise,
reminding some of Hölderlin, Rilke or Emily
Dickinson, with a unique approach, at the same
time mythical and mystical, to the perennial themes
of poetry, giving precedence to the individual’s inner and outer exile.... In The
God’s Orbit, her most successful collection of poetry, Christi strikes the reader by
her seraphic serenity, inspired, as she confesses, by Fra Angelico’s mural paintings.
But ironically, for the collection's title, Christi has indicated she is really referring
to a pre-Christian god, as in the mythologies of Greece and Rome.
In The God’s Orbit, her most successful collection of poetry, Christi strikes the reader by her seraphic serenity,
inspired, as she confesses, by Fra Angelico’s mural paintings; hers is the attitude of someone who, after crossing
a Dantean bolgia, (a hell's ditch), after vanquishing the monsters of the Inferno, has left the drama of lucidity behind
and reached a point in which reality, though still uncontrollable, has no more obscure niches.
In naturally flowing lines, full of a sober inner musicality, that support a painful and clear vision of life,
the often inimical gods slowly turn into God, the all-pacifying.
Aura Christi has published 15 volumes of poetry and 6 novels. Born in 1967 in
Chișinău,Republic of Moldova, she now lives in Romania.The poems here derive
from her 2016 collection, Orbita Zeului (The God’s Orbit). Her poems appeared in
the 2003 anthology of poems of poets from Moldova (the former Soviet Bessarabia),
Singular Destinies, and more recently, in the journal Poem [in the U.K.] and
Osiris,Cider Press Review,North of Oxford and AppleValley Review.
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