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 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.