Traveling With the Ghosts, poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu. Orison Press, Dec. 31, 2021. 108 pp.

Although Stella Vinitchi Radulescu’s new poetry collection, Traveling with the Ghosts, has been called “impressionistic”, the first word that came to mind as I was reading was ethereal.

Orison Books has published Radulescu’s collected poems, and this book felt different—looser, more wistful, less grounded in sharp tonalities and colors. Yellow and blue recur. As do corpses, bones, and wings. The sky is both the vantage point and the sideline.

Samuel Beckett’s stark spirit hovers in the epigraph; the theme of a poet’s relation to the past is carried by ghosts of dead family and friends. Radulescu does not name these presences. Instead, she traces them in widening circles and repetitions. The speaker isn’t traveling with ghosts—she is traveling with the ghosts.

As a poet of open fields and particular punctuations, Radulescu doesn’t bring the closure of periods or the suture-marks of commas to these poems. The em-dash recurs, and functions as a colon to make space for expansion or qualification of what precedes it. The invocative direct address gives us a you that feels related to Romanian grammar—and which characterizesthe poet’s prior work—although this you draws nearer to something sublime, something divine, something that borders on the incredulous.

Alliteration creates a dialogue between titles and sounds inside poems. For example, the poem “invocation” repeats words that begin with a v, and “crossroad” repeats words that begin with a c, so that the chosen letter intersects with the key of the poem, itself. Radulescu has always been musical, and I read her for this, as well as for the estranged speaker, and the crackling syntax.

I loved this book, and the best way for me to explain this may be a cento, with one line taken from most poems, using only Radulescu’s capitalization and punctuation, maintaining her line breaks (though skipping the stanzaic divisions), stacking lines in the same order as the poems, and allowing the lines that held my attention to speak for themselves.

A CENTO WHO LONGS TO BE “TRAVELING WITH THE GHOSTS”

after Stella Radulescu

simple as death
to children of dust to children
I need a sentence to bring them
the violet eyes

the view is nothing but the flight
a word from which you could have died
a body alive or
the gloomy sky a noise like
the metaphor
of a new joy—
a flake of
a human shape of two entangled
squirrels & stars
on quiet pages:

hot inenscapable clock
the ancient house
in me
the lilac in blossom
the rhyme
of sweat & sweet
pouring from my chest
who knows the gender of time
the fire:
I fit in your eye
what else besides
a story
speaks loud and stretches
: the last drop of light

in the air
the shape of my tongue
the coffin on the grass
I feel like opening hundreds
wearing a yellow dress and
worms
from the ceiling hanging
like hope

the poem stands in front
of me
one foot behind the time
one more word for
chime—
would be a snake

the dead army seen from
ecstasy on the road to hell
ask me why
light keeps changing direction
& the flower
the rapture
a word can burn
a grave—
not mine
to be said twice
the tremolo
underground
an insomniac god
the sun &
tigers in cages are praying for me
who has blue eyes

like in a mirror
I am walking on snow as if
music from the bones
the agony of clouds

an apple
touching the earth is all the rain needs
a sky around
days
whose life exploded in the
want to repeat that?

we were in brackets we were
our secret language
the gate &
a pint of blood
a carcass left right here
rowing the silence
in my mouth