Abstract

This work owes a great deal of its spirit to the experience of travelling and living in Romania, and is in part an exploration in poetry of that country's troubled, complicated story. Three voices attempt in three sections to disclose their culture, obsessions and personal tales. The first voice is that of a dictatorial figure, Dragon , who is devoted to power and control, and who burdens the landscape with his neurotic personality and manifestos. The second is that of a woman who tries to discover her own story and record it in journal-like fragments, long after her death. Loosely inspired by the illegitimate daughter of Romania's ruler Stephen the Great, this sixteenth century woman haunts the landscape of the other two voices. The final voice, an unnamed narrator, acts as visitor and observer of vignette-like scenes set in a small, industrial city in Romania, named Târgoviste. Here the people are alienated from their surroundings and yet persevere in surviving them, a perseverance that reaches mythic proportions in a woman named Tatiana. The narrator is at once drawn to and repelled by the landscape. The work as a whole, by varying tone, style, line length, and language, attempts to complicate the authenticity of any one voice and any one history.