Through her poetry collection Carpathia, Cecilia Woloch becomes that rare author who can leave home without rejecting it, then return without losing what she has learned.
Many of her poems take the form of prose postcards from various European capitals, reflecting her personal travel schedule and conveying intimacy among her characters and with readers. Then, interspersed among the cityscapes and photographs are impressions from her personal life: Kentucky childhood memories and last glimpses of her sick, elderly father.
Woloch writes of her hometown with the same poetic emotion she uses for faraway countries and moments of historical poignancy. Her gently humorous reflection ‘Why I Believed … That People Had Sex in Bathrooms” describes her parents’ happy and fruitful marriage with the tenderness and unique language of her young, romantic couples. And her memories of adolescence and young adulthood in rural Kentucky leave us with the taste of sweet wine and the fading glimpse of fireflies.
The phrasing and rhythm of all of her pieces, such as ‘let us with wind on the tips of our tongues live those beginnings again and again,’ from “Postcard to Sarah” and ‘burn my beauty onto the very eye of love,” from “Girl in a Truck” gains its strength through its whispered delicacy. We read lines which first sound sweet, nostalgic, romantic – then find ourselves stopping to read them again to take in the full force of what Woloch communicates.
Carpathia experiments with form along with the free verse, including a pantoum concerning a love triangle, “Le Jardin d’ Isabelle.” We scarcely notice the constraints on word choice and rhythm, as the prescribed repetition seems to come naturally from the author’s focus on a particular time and place. Yet even the selections without a specifically named poetic form contain internal rhythm and structure, accented by italicized thoughts and words and dashes.
In Carpathia, the lines blur among childhood and adulthood, romance and domestic life, early comforts and exotic locales. Home never seems a prosaic country town Woloch throws aside for adventures elsewhere, and her faraway travels do not leave her tired and longing for the past. Every place becomes an occasion to savor, a set of moments and emotions to jot down on a postcard for future reference.
Accessible to most adult readers, Carpathia would be an excellent carry-on for a trip through Europe, or just for reading at home, and will keep readers engrossed longer than the short 75 pages suggest.
Carpathia is available through BOA Editions Ltd., Rochester, New York – and you may find Cecilia Woloch on Facebook and ask for more information.