Immigrant Prodigal Daughter by Lucia Cherciu
Kelsay Books, 2023
Lucia Cherciu dazzles by writing poems both in her native language and English. Her third book of poetry in English, Immigrant Prodigal Daughter, is a stunning evocation of what it means to be split between two worlds, two cultures, two languages, and two longings. It is about taking leave of her homeland, then communist Romania, and returning to it with layers of longing and guilt, and acceptance of the split world of two homes. How do you address what you have left behind? In the title poem, the speaker confesses:
Immigrants carry the burden of sin:
they left behind their fatherswho waited for them all their lives…
… in their ears, a mother’s wail.
How do you meet the expedient present of your found life? In “The Enchantment of Houses,” the speaker acknowledges:
… These days I don’t want to move.
All I want is to sit by the window, drink a cup of tea,and dream of all the places I shouldn’t have left.
Instead of replaying the movie of old houses,I should acknowledge that all houses look the same
as long as I settle down and dissolve the fear.
The poet wanders through her endless gardens of fruit trees, flowers and vegetables trying to plant herself in this new soil with every seed, fruit and flower. The poems tick back and forth between the remembered gardens and orchards of Romania and her gardens here, between two countries and two loves as she tries to settle her psyche in two places as “Momentum” reveals:
… At night, my dreams reconfigured
peels of sweet potatoes and butter squash, joy and abandon.Peach pits and optimism. Grace and gratitude
keep a dream from curdling into a nightmare.
“Everyday Rituals” focuses on her mother’s daily chores in Romania, but it also subtly parallels what the speaker herself has ritualized:
My mother walks to one store
to buy a dark, whole-wheat loaf of bread…to another store the other direction
to buy a small packet of butter…before climbing to her apartment on the fifth floor
and resting her tired feet…as if all of it were some kind of gym
and therapy, a dance she has mastered—
All the while the poet herself has mastered the intricate dancing between two worlds, but it lies heavy on her when her daughter says of traveling to Romania, “‘It’s not my home… It’s your home.”’ And these poems are part of her deft and candid rituals to help master this dance.
In the powerful poem “Grammar is a Map,” we feel the speaker in the grit, beauty, and angst of learning another language—living in another language—and her metaphors are stunning:
Grammar is a map: the words I know in another language
are like benches in the shade…Please forgive my offenses, forget my mistakes
because I have learned every wordin another language with prayer and sweat.
I have walked the country of your grammar…
In “I Thought We Had More Time,” she identifies the spiritual quality of words:
Bicycles and prayer: only those who believe
dare this narrow road with repentance.I scraped my knees, tried to remember
the ascetic, the lapidary, the levitating powerof words learned by heart.
And, indeed, she has allowed us to walk with her—this world where two opposing truths can be true at the same time—as when she confesses she has “[learned] to let go by not letting go,” and so a delicate balance replete with gratitude for the rain, the plants, the child, and the found world sing through these poems of love and loss, and the “deepening labor of loneliness.” It is all one package, the speaker realizes when she concludes in “This Summer I Cannot Travel Home”:
Waiting for the apricot blossoms to take,
watching the fruit form, I am always already home.
She also examines the material world with a brutal eye. In “The Things We Cannot Keep,” based on a Matisse painting, one of the ekphrastic poems in the final section, she acknowledges how we clutter our lives with things, yet can never keep what is truly meaningful:
What we collect, what we accumulate.
And yet the things we cannot keep—flowers, seasons, beloved who go away.
The acerbic gaze that struggles to savefrom the deceit of time. The grace we choose
to sustain: in the painting, flowers don’t wither.
She acknowledges, “The secret is not always / who pays the bill for all the detritus, / but who cleans, who keeps the look sparse.” And in these sparse, fluid and eloquent poems, she shares that she has “… already fallen in love / so I don’t need to buy things anymore.” And yes, Ms. Cherciu, it is easy to fall in love with these poems!
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Raphael Kosek, author of American Mythology (Brick Road Poetry Press) and two prize-winning chapbooks, Harmless Encounters (2022)and Rough Grace (2014), served as Dutchess County NY Poet Laureate 2019-2020. Her work received four Pushcart nominations and was featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily. She teaches at SUNY Dutchess.