Something Else Than Signs

Passionaria Stoicescu is a major Romanian poet and writer, author of more than 60 books. Important literary critics have praised the qualities of her work. Here are just a very few excerpts of their writings:

Passionaria Stoicescu is obviously a daring poetess. If one notices the numerous accents that can be found in the passion she offers, in her steadfastness, ardor, amazement, confession, risk, aspiration, mental transfor­mations, infiltrations in the immaculate, a sort of disappointment, interrogation, absolutism of innocence, and consumption of incorruptibility, then she is even more obstinate than any other dialectics of the metamorphoses she burns in without knowing how to pretend. /Ion Caraion/

As once in Miss Amherst’s case, or as in our autochthonous environment in Constanţa Buzea’s case, in Passionaria Stoicescu’s poetry the erotic feeling includes something bigger: a poetess’s feeling. Hence, maybe a certain intellectual tension of the former and a certain sensuality of the latter. /Laurenţiu Ulici/

Writing down her own secrets, fears and hopes with that clear and thin thread that can lead to the invisible, being accompanied by that soft melody which is sung by a fiancée’s voice, or by that of a tormented mother, tired as that of a wife, the poetess presents herself in what she sings, suffers and offers to life with the naturalness of a permanent simplicity. [...] She will remain the same consistent person to herself, to the formula of a poetry characterized not only by an energetic feminity, but aspiring through the eloquence of her speech, through the profoundness of her poetic thought, to what we call poetry of reflection, perfectly outlined and always of an exemplary feeling of purity. /Radu Cârneci/

Passionaria Stoicescu’s poetry can exist without any typological principles, residing not only in the feminine–masculine, but also in the modernism–traditionalism or in the innovation–experiment. The author does not feel or continue with the distinctions that are characteristic to her chronological generation, nor does she take into consideration the spatial original concept. This means she ought to be taken over like a priceless trophy. /Aureliu Goci/

An effigy for the coat of arms of our contemporary Romanian poetry, Passionaria Stoicescu’s creation is an emblematic one as far as the significance of the postmodernist lyrics is concerned.
As a predestination of a fulfillment in a sign, her poetry surrounds her name with nimbus, the poetess being born out of an ardent passion for all that life can give to us. Fascinating and threatening at the same time, like the vastness of a sea, she embodies the life where the temptation of the swimming goes beyond the risk of a shipwreck in Nothing.
Aware of her mission, the author wanders in poetry looking for the ‘code’ of her freedom to plunge in disillusion, with the entire assuming of her greatness and tragic.

As a unique certitude opposed to frivolousness, the word is the divine gift of the saving sacrifice in the dramatic and permanent confronting with her own limits.
The author’s poetic universe can be defined according to the directions of a new aesthetics, of a lucid and responsible consciousness that takes the daily occurrence into consideration, revealing its dramatic character just in that lack of meaning which is assumed in a self-referential manner. Biography becomes the element which rules the imaginary. However it is emphasized from an abysmal point of view, as a reiteration of certain mythical or Biblical message. According to the same order of the artistic act of consciousness, the poetess assumes Christ’s passion in the dissipation of an existence she offers to herself, begging for the body, the Word i.e. the mind, and all this in the name of such a love and detested life which is fulfilled only through poetry. /Antonia Bodea/