Anita Elena Beloiu: Painting with Words, Light, and Emotion

The author Anita Elena Beloiu unfolds before our eyes the project of her life, a daring and mature activity. Anita is simultaneously poet, photographer and painter; raised in Ploiești, surrounded by the soul and poetry of Nichita Stănescu. Authors of writings and books have always been concerned with the graphic form and the eventual decoration of the words, to give them an appearance as original as possible. Thus, the cover of this book is illustrated with an own painting including the entire illustration of the book which is a reproduction of some of the poet’s original paintings.

A book of poems on the border of dream and reality, in the volume “Alb” we find a somewhat faithful transcription of thought under the tyranny of fantasy. The text relies on the expressiveness of the word rather than its obscurity. The whole book is thought of as a continuous poem whose sequences often take the form of a haiku and through metaphorical concentration and the suggestion of multiple meanings: “in autumn all leaves die... / red, brown, orange / how can death have so many colors.” Following the metaphysical thrill caused by the implacable flow of time, the mental present becomes ever more intense, being aware of the extinction that comes with the passing of time:
“i am at peace with the land wedged in my palm / i renounce my flesh to it.

There is dissatisfaction and a taste of unhappiness as well, otherwise a good part of life would be missing. Tormented by so many existential questions and perplexities, Anita Elena Beloiu finds solace in nature, because nature has a balsamic power: “colors will come and unfurl with their wings / what my bones wear / and my bones will crumble little by little / giving birth to oak trees / their white blossom my heritage.”

Octavio Paz thus begins his scintillating essay of 1956: “Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power, abandonment. An operation capable of changing the world, poetic activity is revolutionary by nature; a spiritual exercise, it is a means of interior liberation.” Beloiu’s poetry is striking due to the strive for inner liberation, the frankness of the lyrical gesture, and the tendency to enter difficult altitudes of life. To experience the thirst for the absolute and to surrender to a call coming from the depths of our being. Anita Elena Beloiu allows herself to be tempted by several types of lyrical diction, although it seems that she tries them measuredly, restrained without the enthusiasm of a high-spirited beginner, nor with equally harmful illusions. A spirit of observation, sometimes polemical, sometimes anti-polemical, reveals a search for self-awareness, for the intimacy of the person’s uniqueness in relation to the other people often overwhelmed by history and the act of survival.

A true poetic art that contains the metaphysics of creation in an exquisite form flows from her lyrics: “heaven is a field of sunflowers / where the sounds and colors of summer explode / the place where i’m always reborn / to convince myself that life is the art of forgetting / all that was taken / sometimes far too soon / humbled of all that is replaced.”

We can say with conviction that Anita’s poems are the illustration of the Mallarmean expression: that verses are not made with ideas at all, they are made only with words. The ecstatic fusion of the soul with the world that surrounds it gives the poetry of Anita Elena Beloiu the necessary dose of mystery to keep us trapped in the reading of these special poems and wanting more.

Mihai Mustățea