Gelu Vlasin - “Romanian Rhythm in Sydney”

GELU VLASIN – presentation by Loredana  Tudor - Tomescu

“Romanian Rhythm in Sydney” , 26^th of March 2016, State Library of New South Wales

Journalist but, more important to me, poet, Gelu Vlasin writes that kind of poetry of which you can say is either good or bad, no grey area here. It all depends on one’s perception about love. If you see love as an eternal spring with trees blooming while snowing their pinkish-white petals over couples making vows of everlasting love, then it’s going to be mostly impossible to look to Vlasin’s poetry as if you’d just gained access to a private tour through Versailles secret chambers, or as if you’d be in front of an undiscovered yet 8^th wonder of the world.

On contrary, if you see love as an ailment, affliction, illness, malaise or disease- of which I was so fortunate to have suffered plenty, thank God for that!- then Vlasin’s poetry gives us all the medical instruments to monitor this so badly needed, so badly wanted disease: Love.

When your heart is not yours anymore and it doesn’t listen to anything you want or ask from it, pounding as if it wants to jump  out of your chest, in search of a more accommodating body- well, I can’t see it other than being a disease and that’s how I mostly feel when in love. Maybe that’s why Gelu Vlasin’s poetry is so familiar to me, so dear , almost like a mandatory medicine to keep this wonderful disease – love- at bay. Following the heart, our mind, our logic, our sense of being, our dreams, our plans, our friends and, ultimately, our life detonate themselves and you tell me: how is love NOT a disease?

All these and a lot more you can find in Gelu Vlasin’s poetry, where keeping an equal pace, constant temperature of the poetical phrase – how does he do it, really?- a stable intensity of all sort of crisis – panic attack, a bit of depression, well, a bit more, a short tag-play with dementia, a daring game of psychosis – the author highlights that love takes  everything out of its natural place and never puts it back. And we all know Love Does That. So, quite few of us are going to recognize some of the feelings that once have troubled us.

Here are some of the books  written by Gelu Vlasin:  Ayla, Don Quijote The Wanderer, The Tower Poem, Panic Attack, The Last Breath, The Décor Man.

For today I have selected few poems from his debut book, “Treatise in Psychiatry”, already translated in 4 languages: French, English, German, Spanish.

Depression TWO

You’re the short haired unknown subway episode

I gave you a y tram ticket then

And you told me

You

Have a brown haired boyfriend

With a decent salary

And a Garnet Cielo car,

And lacquer shoes “made in Italy”

And large bed sitter in the Romana Square…

Oh, how I’d like to tell you  a few words

About Joyce Lauren Blanc or

Frost-the-dwarf,

One blue night,

Listening to Pink Floyd and Tom Waits

And drinking mulled wine

Ina wine cellar

In the city’s belly-button

-But you’re getting off

And anyway

I wouldn’t have had money for two.

Depression SEVEN

Your rebellious eyes are

 Two big words

Dazed when the lips whisper the evening prayer

And I

Can’t remember

The hands suspended

Over the numb(ed) thighs

Or the fallen hair

In a speechless dream

 Or

The fake dusty covers

On top of which I pour

Pleasantries

In a student hostel bed

While despair

Chases me across hallways

…Mad race till dawn

To make me write

 About my life

 Colourfully.

Space Phobia

There are blanks by the windows

When your sleep dreams my dream.

A lie painted on purple canvas

Or the machine

That can clean

The other people’s sin…

The day before yesterday

I would have loved you for these blanks,

I would have buried my helplessness

In the common grave

Which is your kingdom…

There are blanks by the windows

While I’m still waiting for you…