Carmen Bugan

“A stunningly powerful piece of writing, a modern classic.” –The Sunday Times on Burying the Typewriter

“The essays provide an academic monograph on how poetry, a poet’s voice and craft, can and should approach questions of politics and justice…. Thus begins a personal and professional journey where she not only seeks to find a way back to understanding and forward from her family’s and her birth country’s suffering, a way to use poetry to write herself free of oppression and repression. She considers how language and its uses — the adaptability of the lyric form, adjusting to and leveraging an adopted language, creating artistic distance and managing the challenges of turbulent times with integrity and a rigorous commitment to speak truth — allow the poetic “I” to find a voice that is true to one own’s experience but true also for others, a voice of witness. The essays make the case for “poetry as a form of salvation”—a form or a means to salvation. But more, Bugan makes the case for integrity and truth.”–Rick Larios, The Manhattan Review

“A chronicle-poem, Time Being has the variety and the unexpectedness of narrative, of life itself; the lines reach out to the readers, so many of whom will have had the same or parallel experiences. The domestic theme is rooted in a ‘normal’ world which is not shock-proof but is shared, unlike the extreme conditions of her upbringing. The book shows her making the transition to a new poetic milieu where she retains the urgency of her voice, the political awareness and the determination to tell the truth, which has been characteristic since the beginning. It will be interesting to see what comes next; meanwhile, a line from ‘Conversation with the Soul’ resonates, exemplifying how poetry can point us in the direction of a tentative search for wisdom: ‘Light is not a trick, it lets you see the shape of things.’”–Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Cyphers

“…beautiful and intensely scrupulous book. … far-ranging political and cultural analysis”–George Kalogeris, Literary Matters, Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers, on Poetry and the Language of Oppression

“For Bugan, it is the surveillance from within that protects her from the surveillance without, at least in so far as being observed will later become the materia poetica of her ever-resourceful, self-reflective art of deflection. Note the way each line observes itself being observed in the act of excellent writing, the pressure on the versification pushing back against the pressures of the oppression. The only direct quotation among the many direct observations is registered as: ‘alone by herself / Talking to no one for many hours.’ Alone by herself, the self in extremis under surveillance”.—George Kalogeris, Literaray Matters

“The poems reprinted here are in their different ways remarkable but nothing can beat ‘The Divorce’ for its combination of emotional power and linguistic restraint. It’s one of the most memorable modern poems of witness I have read. […] This is in every way a stunning volume by an utterly remarkable writer.”–Duncan Wu, Raymond A Wagner Professor of Literary Studies, Georgetown University, on Poetry and the Language of Oppression

“This beguiling memoir is reminiscent at times of the wonderful childhood autobiographies of Sergei Aksakov and Maxim Gorki.”–Paul Bailey, Independent, on Burying the Typewriter

“In the minutiae of her study she has provided Heaney students with a valuable resource that will be challenging to surpass.”–Gerard Smyth on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile

“‘No patriotism but in things’—things turned into images cut on a printer’s block.”–The Manhattan Review on Lilies from America

“An incorruptible woman of letters. … from the grey inhumanity of the documents to the deep colours of her art”–Sir Christopher Ricks

“We have here a telling biographical document on the exasperation of captivity and the lyrical, surprising consequence of such a spiritual nightmare.”–Norman Manea on Releasing the Porcelain Birds

“Bugan, a published poet, can with a single sentence paint a portrait of almost visceral immediacy.[…] If Bugan’s memoir is transformative, her poetry is downright alchemical, transmuting the deprivations of her family’s life experiences into dreamy gold.”–The Irish Times

“Bugan has written a deeply personal account of her travels across the languages of poetry and oppression. These two languages, she argues with admirable clarity, are not isolated from one another; they are often co-present, compelling us to come to terms with the fragility of poetry.” — Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature , Queen Mary University of London, on Poetry and the Language of Oppression