PRAISE THE UNBURIED
By Clara Burghelea
Chaffinch Press $15.99
Reviewed by Irina Moga
In Clara Burghelea’s second book of poetry, Praise the Unburied (Chaffinch Press, 2021), she binds a suite of stunning and radiant poetic narratives into an airy canvas tinged by grief and joie de vivre – all while surfacing the puzzle of womanhood at its zenith.
The author steps effortlessly from page to page, taking us through time capsules filled with searing emotions and images that define her passages from girlhood into maturity.
As we discern from Burghelea's verses, one of the steppingstones to embracing womanhood is to come to terms with the all-encompassing grief of losing a mother. Fragments from "White-night odes" illuminate this labyrinth of sorrow:
The mothers we carry, the mothers we crave
are everywhere but where we need them.
Next, their peeping-tom breath
over our shoulders as we make breakfast or beds,
dust off furniture or broth our ways through
the remainder of the week, poems as lungs, charring
our throats, no mouth to spit them out. (15)
Burghelea's raw rendition of the multifaceted layers of being a woman – sensuality, motherhood, hormones – pins powerful images to her poetry volume. She boldly talks of the "Body time according to my ovaries" (51), blissful moments on the beach with young children, and passion in the in-between of night and day, or madrugada (which is also the title of one of her poems):
Lay your fat lips,
jitterbugged with sharp-edged kisses, then voice, a saxophone
Sunday cleaning the air in between our bodies. (42)
We sense, though, that the author views her experiences as an entry point to writing poetry, the making of a literary fabric as sensations are laid bare: "At the back of your mind, a poem ready to stain the page" (30).
One of the book's salient points is Burghelea's depth and breadth of vocabulary, the easiness with which she shape-shifts syllables to turn them into highly poetic syntagms. It’s no small feat since the author's mother tongue is Romanian. Yet Burghelea navigates with ease the corridors of words and shoots us back glittering lines:
When I look up, there he is, thrusting his arm
through the twinned chambers of my heart,
resurfacing within the lustered geometry
of a belated snowflake. (60)
The intrinsic musicality of Burghelea's work is pervasive throughout the volume, and the last poems in the book point us to an atmosphere of serenity and balance, which provides some possible clues into her future writing.
One that we are sure to wait with impatience.
Romanian-born Irina Moga is the author of four poetry books and a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada. Her work has appeared in Canadian Literature, dandelion, carte-blanche, PRISM International online, The Chaffin Journal and others. Irina’s latest poetry volume, Sea Glass Circe, was selected for an official book launch as part of the 2020 Toronto LitUp!, Toronto International Festival of Authors. Follow her on Twitter @pictopoems.