In Those Years, No One Slept by Claudia Serea

In Those Years, No One Slept by Claudia Serea BROADSTONE BOOKS Paperback, 116 pages ISBN: 978-1-956782-31-8, $21.50 

Reviewed by Marek Kulig

Claudia Serea’s newest poetry collection, In Those Years, No One Slept (Broadstone Books, February 2023) begins with the strike of a match. Many poems begin like this: a glimmer, a spark, an idea the motion detector of verse recognizes as a creation on which light ought to be cast, setting it forth with a little hope. While existence began, according to theoretical physics, with the Big Bang, poetry begins, according to Serea, with humans sitting in the dark, tinkering, making up to make do. What does this look like? Here is “The man playing with matches”:

He sits in the dark

and lights matches

to keep warm.

One by one,

he holds up

trembling lights

with human heads:

grandfather,

father,

uncle,

and a distant cousin—

carbon profiles,

flame hair.

They flicker,

throwing shadows

on the walls.

They rise, move, and glow—

then, one by one,

he blows them out.

An ars poetica in bookending stanzas. Also notice the central friction between generation and cessation. The ignited matches give life to the family, but in that next line, after a lamentable breath of em-dash and pause of space break, these people are, in the end, “carbon profiles,” flammable, susceptible to extinguishment.

After all, the “those years” in the title reference the years Serea spent under Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. His name, however, appears only once: near the end of the collection, in the middle of the poem “A village in Romania,” buried on a skinny horse-drawn cart among “technical drawings / of useless contraptions.” To the wayside with the wicked.

The road through those harrowing years is, undeniably, strewn with sleeplessness, a dearth of common goods, fear, desperation. But here, too, is resilience, heart, wonder, and life. In the kitchens, mums cook for those returned from the blighted, serrated edges of the world. In the gardens, children's hands are what they harvest, beets, red and hard from the cold. In the minds of those who survived is admiration, honor, and the remembrance of lives persistent and true despite death’s tyrannical insistence.

At nightfall, beet juices smeared

the November sky.

No one saw us stealing from the cold ground,

only the starlings and crows.

No one saw the small hands

digging into the dirt,

feeling for round roots

sweet like candy.

Boiled, the beets were soft

and bloodied our mouths

as if we ate the sun.

Serea’s signature youthfulness finds its way into these poems as well. Take “We played wedding”, in which a young Serea and two friends stage a marriage, the bride and groom about to kiss, if not for a interruption (Should anyone present know of any reason that this couple should not be joined in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace!) from the 4th floor window:

Kids!.../

They got sunflower oil at the Alimentară,

hurry up and get in line!

And we ran,

leaving our wedding to the ants.

In a poem titled “1954”, Serea’s father, who features predominantly in many poems, smokes a cigarette alongside Frank O’Hara, the former in Romania plowing fields, the latter in New York City. Serea appears decades later, as a rabbit that

...runs from the field in Romania

into a bar in New York City,

foolish enough to believe

it can escape.

To those unfamiliar with Serea’s writing (or Romania’s history), let these poems be the little lights (recall those glowing matches?) that simultaneously unshadow the scourge of communism in Romania and uncover her rich back catalog. In Those Years, No One Slept is Claudia Serea at her most endearingly puckish and narratively vigorous, her most at home, Romanian-American and writing world-class poetry.

Marek Kulig immigrated to the USA from Poland in 1992. A former high school English teacher, he currently works in medical sales. Recent poems in VIBE, Little Old Lady, Plants and Poetry, Rat’s Ass Review, and NiftyLit. He also writes food articles for Edible Southeastern Massachusetts. More at www.marekkulig.com.