Eastern Shadows:  Poems of Romania, 2008-2009
by Richard Milazzo.

With a Romanian translation by Adrian Sângeorzan.
First edition paperback:  January 2010.
160 pages, with a black and white photograph of the author, Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, July 2007, by Joy L. Glass on the frontispieces, and color photographic illustrations on the cover by the author.
8 x 5.75 in., printed, sewn and bound in Romania.
ISBN:  978-606-8031-38-5.
Published by Scrisul Romanesc, Craiova, Romania, 2010.

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Eastern Shadows: Poems 2008-2009 by Richard Milazzo comprises the poems the author wrote mostly while in Budapest and traveling across Romania in the winter of 2009.  The titles of the poems give us some idea of the book’s subject matter: “Budapest Dream,” “Tomb of Gül Baba,” “Gellért Hill: Song of the Four Elements,” “Szabadság Bridge,” “Everywhere in Buda,” “The Trams at Ter Gellért,” “Bucharest,” “Stavropoleos,” “The Fences of Romania,” “What is Held in Shadows,” “Liar’s Bridge,” “Sibiu,” “Sighisoara,” “Cluj,” “Sighisoara II: The Scholars’ Stair,” “Desesti,” “Memory of the Pain,” “Merry Cemetery at Sãpânta, Rasca,” “Moldavita,” “Sucevita: The Ladder of Virtues,” “Arbore,” “Voronet,” “Humor,” “The Black Church of Brasov.”  The tall wooden churches and painted monasteries of Northern Romania – the Maramures and Moldavia – visited while traveling along the derelict, if not wholly abandoned, and snow-covered infrastructure of the country, become an effective way for the author to establish a lyrical infrastructure in the poems that reflects allegorically a culture of wood, a poignant spiritual interiority, and irrepressible erotic underpinnings, qualities and attributes that would ultimately stand their ground against and prevail over what once was, in the not so distant past, and metaphorically speaking, a tyranny of metal, i.e., a Communist military dictatorship that ruled with iron fists and the proverbial iron boot, and that is only now finally thawing.  The intangible, even abstract, but sensuous lyricism of Easter Shadows is firmly rooted in the complex political and social reality of this forgotten country in eastern Europe, the author often turning to the poor, the louche, and outré gypsy culture to reaffirm the threshold values inherent in the struggle to become human again.