"Concerto" and "Deva" are poems selected from the book "Time Laden with Innocence" authored by Dan Totilca. The book was published in 2005 and is available for sale on Amazon.com. The Preface of the book follows.
Dan Totilca was born in Romania in 1963. In 1981 he immigrated to Canada. While studying at York University in Toronto he began his artistic career as a painter, sculptor, and writer. In 1997 he immigrated to United States. He worked for a while on a “traveling memoirs” book and wrote lots of poetry. As one listens to what Totilca has to say about his world of poetry one gets amazed that most of the poems he wrote are just a transposition in poetry of memories from his childhood. To have such a clue at hand doesn’t cause damage to his poetry at all. On the contrary, the wonder of this kind of writing is that it gives one the impression that what is revealed as poetry doesn’t need clarification. The merit of the present selection is that it allows us to hear Totilca’s own poetical voice. Earlier influences from Yannis Ritsos are all gone. Totilca’s own style seems more complex and foggy than the style of his predecessors, although through some miraculous wording it seems weightless. Some of his best poems are personal and confessional like small journeys into the world of innocence―where secret events get unwrapped and the parade of ghosts and deities appear in the maze of childhood mysteries. The essential quality of these poems is their dramatic effect due to the tension built by powerful words and shattered sentences.
It is well known that a poem stays within poetry and keeps being alive for centuries as long as it does not become a prosaic story. That’s why Totilca’s poetry will endure. His poetry is an assemblage of epiphanies: this creates a strange feeling that a metaphor is at work so that it invites the reader to a puzzle-solving game. No matter how many times one reads one of his poems there is always some unsolved mystery that remains hidden there. Perhaps this is why every new reading seems to be a challenge to decipher the style while in reality the story that a poem incarnates is the one “mystery” that calls for a come back. This also explains why Totilca’s poems seem to describe a world that appears “discontinued” while keeping alive its exchange with what is actual and present.
To paraphrase Totilca, as he puts it in one of his essays, that “life is better understood when past becomes the subject of delusion and metaphor,” I might say that indeed a true state of knowing must include poetry. Poetry, from this perspective, should be part of each and everyday occurrence. To Totilca that’s how life is: being aware of every moment of living and interpreting it through compulsive poetry. A good poem in Totilca’s own definition “should gradually build sense―defeat sense, loose steadily common sense but gain poetry.” Wonderful and worth while!
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