The Lens of a Flame
Ioana Ieronim

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Ioana Ieronim: The Lens of a Flame

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On Tempo Rubato, the Time of Poetry

‘There is a state that is both intensely in and intensely out of the world. Its senses are deeply bound into the flesh but its spirit is, locates itself in nature and symbols beyond its particular time. It is poignant, human, yet yearns for another state altogether, a kind of hybridity  where you find  “things / longing to be / elsewhere” or in a place where “our bare blind hands / may feel the edge of things / unnamed at the time when we / were torn asunder”.

Ioana Ieronim's poems begin with words, pass through nature and apprehensions of states beyond both nature and words, and end with bodies in a group of beautiful love songs that could have been written at any time in history, that float into language as naturally as the sharp air that billows around them, as naturally as the Song of Solomon. And yet it is language we end with. It is language that keeps us in the present, in the flesh, 'defying gravity' as one song says, “in words // when even the words / are sometimes too heavy'. The words in Ieronim never seem heavy. They are ancient and light and present.”’

George Szirtes

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Words are for this poet like an elixir of life: an occurrence, once translated into words will come to be alive. Ioana Ieronim can see in and by way of words, words are this unique organ whereby to live. The reader’s experience is that of a simultaneous here/there, the condition of an angel haunted by the demon of a body.

This kind of poetry is an unrepeatable burden: what has started cannot start again, but it can (has to) come to an end. The role of poetry is that of letting us dissolve into light, the primordial light which denies the evidence of a night, and won’t accept the loss of feeling: the protagonists are here and rely on a reality beyond. It is the adventure of two souls that have taken their refuge in timelessness, but have forgotten to part with their bodies.

[…] Ioana Ieronim keeps a distance from all the variety of literary trends that have ever emerged, though she knows them well, down to our literary age of the year 2010 when people have even stopped trying to give a name to emerging literary modes. Hers is a poetry of dazzling simplicity, which is at once love song, metaphysics of love and philosophy of utterance from the moment when it rises in the mind, to the whirlwind of a poem. That’s what her poetry is indeed: one instant of the whirlwind of being on the threshold of boundless non-being.

Lidia Vianu


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Ioana Ieronim: The Lens of a Flame

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