Mircea Cartarescu's 'Poetry' tome, launched at Humanitas Cismigiu Bookshop on Tuesday

Mircea Cartarescu's "Poetry" tome, gathering the author's poetry works, will be launched at the Humanitas Bookshop near the Cismigiu Gardens on Tuesday.

Photo credit: (c) ANGELO BREZOIANU / AGERPRES ARCHIVE

According to a release of Humanitas Publishing House, sent to AGERPRES, also attending the event, together with the author, will be Gabriel Liiceanu, Dan-Liviu Boeriu and Radu Vancu.

In the 784 pages, the tome gathers the complete copies of the tomes: "Faruri, vitrine, fotografii" (Headlights, shop windows, photographs) (1980), "Poeme de amor" (Love Poems) (1983), "Totul" (Everything) (1985), "Dragostea" (Love) (1994), "Cincizeci de sonete" (50 Sonnets) (2003), "Nimic" (Nothing) (2010).

"When I am asked which of my books I regard as most important, I almost automatically answer "Nostalgia" [Nostalgia], "Levantul" [The Levant] and "Orbitor" [Blinding]. Each time, however, I obscurely feel I am doing an injustice. That I am leaving aside, forgotten in a shadowed area of the mind, a fourth major book of mine, which for a quarter of a century I have been trying to forget, as an old and yet unhealed love. It is the corpus of my lyric poems, written in my youth, in a continuous, hallucinating and exhausting effort that lasted 12 years. When I look back, I immediately see that glowing flame, that desperate search for new forms, that continuous measuring of powers in an unequal skandenberg with poetry, which could have made, only by itself, my complete work," the release quotes the author as saying.

Cartarescu says the decision made in 1992 to abandon poetry represented in fact "a symbolic suicide in hope for a rebirth," poetry finding "a way to flow further" in the author's writing.

"When, around 1992, I decided not to write...