Donald Riggs despre Iona îl aşteaptă pe Godot

Poems energized by primal emotion

“ How refreshing it is to read such poems energized by primal emotion!  Love and its instances of frustration, as well as the awareness of how the passion of love can evolve into everyday dullness—these are the motivating forces of Aldea’s poems!

The voice that animates these poems is the voice of breakthrough poetic movements of various ages:  the Surrealists of the 1920s, the Beats of the 1950s, the Romantics of Germany, England, and France of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  As with the Surrealists, Aldea’s poems will burst through with startling images of great emotional intensity that grab the reader by the throat:  “our hearts broke the doors of our chests / and French kissed with their blood tongues” has the physical organ of the hearts bursting with the passion of the heart as seat of emotion, but still exploding through that area of the torso caged by the ribs and sternum—and then transform into mouths with tongues to French kiss!  What a series of metamorphoses, always following the principle of love’s expansion!

The highs of love inevitably precede the lows of loss, as riding a surfboard to the crest of a rising wave leads to beings smashed down into the surf and grit of the shore.  Thus goes Aldea’s poem “x,” which starts in the wave’s trough:  “This sadness of mine comes from a lung cold, / I used to smoke you up to the fag, / no sign of life from you now” starts with the relating of an emotion, sadness, with that misery that we all know from experience, a cold where our lungs are blocked with phlegm.  The brilliant part is that Aldea continues to show that the lover’s passion for his woman has caused this ailment, because he found her to be such a stimulant that he sucked her smoke, the product of her own inner fire, into his inner being like pulling deeply on a cigarette.  We all know that love, that infatuation, like cigarettes, are addictive, and that breathing in that rough excitement can have its consequences!

There is great tenderness as well at times in these poems.  His poem “a kind of you, a kind of me” likens the woman, the “you,” to “a kind of sea” and himself to “a kind of sun,” that gets in and out of her at dawn and at dusk.  This goes beyond the sexual metaphor—though that is definitely there, and part of the poem’s energy—to a complementation of the two, of yin and yang, female and male.  Also, at a point of near despair, the poet states that, in his dwelling, “a rat has committed suicide out of love / for the lass on the ground floor” and thus brings his personal feelings into communion with the rest of nature, as Garcia Lorca did with his poem about Mr. and Mrs. Lizard, “el lagarto esta llorando…el lagarto y la lagarta” and René Char with the swift: “Martinet aux ailes trop larges…Tel est le coeur.”

Aldea’s poems refresh us with the primal intensity of his passion, the power of which effects metamorphoses from one state of being to another, carrying the reader’s consciousness over the borders between different layers of existence, with love, in all of its moods, as the connective force.” 

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Donald Riggs

 (professor at the Drexel University, Philadelphia, United States) about Iona is waiting for Gogot (Iona îl aşteaptă pe Godot, Marineasa, 2010, Timişoara)