"Crossing the Carpathians" is a collection of poems about exile, family, and the survival of love. Carmen Bugan was born in Romania, and her book has its origins in her experiences during the 1980s, as a child of political dissidents and as an exile from her country. Written in America, Ireland, and England, her poems are about crossing countries and languages, recording loss and celebration, reconciling memories with dreams.
About the Author
Carmen Bugan is the author of a memoir, "Burying the Typewriter", and a monograph, "Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile". Her work has appeared in "Harvard Review", "Modern Poetry in Translation", the "TLS", and "PN Review". Her poetry has been widely anthologised, most recently in Penguin's "Poems for Life and Joining Music with Reason", "34 Poets", "British and American", and has been translated into Italian. She was a Hawthornden Fellow, a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford, and received an Individual Artist's Grant from the Arts Council of England. She was educated at the University of Michigan, The Poets' House in Ireland, and Oxford University. Carmen lives near Geneva, Switzerland, with her husband and two small children.
Reviews
"To say these poems are beautiful is to risk underselling them. It is the specific nature of their beauty that matters, compounded as it is of dark experience, hope, magic, delight, generosity and love of language. Bugan is such a natural poet that the most apparently straightforward account of life under Ceausescu transcends its grim subject. Her love poems and poems of landscape have a freshness one can only ache for" – George Szirtes
