Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and now her country's strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceausescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. Over the years, her works have become the symbol of an ethical consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian government. This new translation by Viorica Patea and Paul Scott Derrick combines her two collections, The Sun of Hereafter (2000) and Ebb of the Senses (2004), both written after the fall of the Iron Curtain while Blandiana was actively and selflessly involved in the public sphere as President of the Civic Alliance (1990-2001), a non-political organisation that made possible Romania's integration into the European Union. These two books mark a turning point in Blandiana's poetic evolution: they lead towards a new conception of poetry as a reflection on being that culminates in My Native Land A4 (first published in Romania in 2010 and published in English by Bloodaxe in 2014). After 1989, the motifs of her poetry remain the same but they acquire a more universal dimension. For Blandiana, the writer is less a creator than a witness of the world she inhabits. She believes that poetry records the experience of one's time and insists that it is 'not a series of events, but a sequence of visions'. Blandiana's poetry oscillates between the sensual perception of the world and a nostalgia for transcendence. Enigmatic definitions alternate with a series of coded questions charged with melancholic gravity. In fact, her poetry could be seen as a quest for definitions reached through a series of questions. Her poems describe the degradation of humanistic values and the different ways in which the individual is threatened. They express a yearning for a state of primordial purity and an awareness of destructive forces which the self must confront.

Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism. Over the years, her poetry became symbolic of an ethical consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian governments. This new translation combines five of her collections, three of protest poems from the 1980s followed by her two collections of love poetry. The poems of Predator Star (1985) and The Architecture of Waves (1990) chronicle a convulsed history and pose the question of how to resist the terror of history. Clock without Hours (2014) marks a return to rhyme, as Blandiana attempts a courageous renovation of traditional verse forms. Her fiercely militant voice - that helped inaugurate the postmodern idiom in Romanian poetry in 1984 - has modulated over time into a new tone of forgiveness and renunciation, expressed in meditations on the fragility and vulnerability of being. She has also written two collections of love poems which rank among the most beautiful in contemporary Romanian poetry - October, November, December (1972) and Variations on a Given Theme (2018) - the second of these composed after the death of her husband, Romulus Rusan, in 2016. A prolific and expansive poet, Ana Blandiana constantly re-invents herself. Her work ultimately reflects on universal issues, on human existence itself in our 21st-century consumer society.

Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident before for the fall of Communism, and now her country's strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceausescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. She was co-founder and President of the Civic Alliance from 1990, an independent non-political organisation that fought for freedom and democratic change, and more recently co-founded the Memorial for the Victims of Communism. Blandiana redefines her poetics in every new book of poetry she publishes. In My Native Land A4 she recreates a land of words, water, trees, cities with abandoned churches, fallen angels that cannot find their way back to heaven, and gods that learn to roller-skate to try to reach the young who remain oblivious of their existence. She projects visionary spaces within the confines of a page - the A4 sheet of her title - which emerge out of her imagination as anguished territories in which the lyrical 'I' is compelled to draw precise, clear boundaries out of a diffuse magma of words. The poems articulate a quest for love, beauty and truth and affirm an urgent need for existential authenticity as a requisite for the redemption of the self, chronicling the struggle between a constantly deteriorating body that is learning how to die and the spirit that strives to overcome its physical constraints. My Native Land A4 contains meditations on fundamental themes such as the fragility and vulnerability of being, the inexorable toll of time, the limitations of the human condition and the correspondence between life and death within the cosmic rhythms of the universe. The print edition of My Native Land A4 only includes the English translations. The e-book with audio is a bilingual Romanian-English edition with most of the poems read in Romanian by Ana Blandiana.

Inscribed in the rich fantastical tradition of Romanian literature while communing with other traditions, this book uses fantasy to denounce, in a covert manner, the grotesqueness of existence within a totalitarian state. The four stories included belong as much to fantastical literature as they do to testimony writing, the narrative combining as it does the confessional tone of a realistic journal with incursions from a visionary imagination. Rediscovered in 1977 after having been rejected by Romanian censorship due to its antisocial tendencies, this was the first book of short stories written by prestigious Romanian author Ana Blandiana. "Inscrito en la nutrida tradicion fantastica de la literatura de Romania a la vez que dialoga con otras tradiciones, este libro se sirve de lo fantastico para denunciar, de manera encubierta, la dimension grotesca de la existencia en un estado totalitario. Los cuatro relatos incluidos pertenecen tanto a la literatura fantastica como a la literatura de testimonio, pues la narrativa combina el tono confesional de un diario realista con las incursiones de una imaginacion visionaria. Aparecido en 1977 despues de ser rechazado por la censura rumana debido a sus tendencias antisociales, este fue el primer libro de relatos de la prestigiosa autora rumana Ana Blandiana."