Poetry and the Language of Oppression

Carmen Bugan, George Orwell Prize Fellow, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Lilies from America: New and Selected Poems (a PBS Special Commendation), a memoir, Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police (a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week) and a monograph on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile. She was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan, a Chargée de Cours at the Université de Fribourg in Switzerland, and taught in the Continuing Education department at the University of Oxford, while she was a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College. She has a doctorate in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford. She currently teaches at the Gotham Writers' Workshop in Manhattan.

• PrefaceIntroduction: "Visiting the Country of My Birth"1: Sounding the Deeps of Nature: Lyric Language and the Language of Oppression2: The "lyric I": Private and Public Narratives3: Resettling in the English Language4: Artistic Distance and the Language of Oppression5: Writing in Turbulent TimesConclusion: Lumina Mea

... beautiful and intensely scrupulous ... Throughout the book, Bugan's own highly regarded poetry serves to distil the essence of her far-ranging political and cultural analysis and to re-enact it in verse that strikes close to home -- home that for her stricken family was a target of Nicolae Ceaulsescu's fascist regime.