In the poem, 'The Minutiae of Daily Life,' Daniela Nicolaescu writes, 'All these details and many more, who can compose poetry from all the trifles that occupy most of our lives.' Nicolaescu's volume 'Hyperboréen' encompasses a wide range of life but the writing is so strong that little of that life is never trivial. Much of the life in Nicolaescu's poetry is the life of those the poet loves. But the beloveds are never simply cyphers; Nicolaescu always gives these people character and agency that is uniquely their own. It is this clear-eyed specificity that is the key note to this fine book. Where Nicolaescu creates a heady surrealism in a number of these poems, that surrealism is always pinned to a very solid reality. This is a very satisfying book, that delights both the imagination and the eye.
Ian Pople
Nicolaescu's poetry is fraught with the struggle to come to terms with the modern human condition, straddling what is real and surreal. It seeks to find comfort in nature and other people in a world at odds against pain and ill-health. And against those odds, she succeeds. A poignant debut.
Ross Heard
The adjective "hyperborean", which forms the title of the volume (Hyperboréen, Éditions Spinelle, 2024, French-English bilingual edition), refers to a mythical people from the far North, descendants of the sun god Apollo. For the poet Daniela Nicolaescu, this legendary land explored in her verses takes on the meaning of a distant, or even lost, paradise, one that no longer has the power to extend its rays into a present marked by illness or instability. The geographical reality circumscribed by the harsh bora wind thus lays bare an imaginary of personal reinvention, of the cycle of birth, extinction, and rebirth presupposed by each season and, respectively, by each element associated with it. Earth, Water, Air, Fire are the four classical elements that not only structure the book’s fourfold architecture but also play a major role in the author’s existential self-assumption, more precisely in her own becoming. The experiences conveyed through Earth, Water, Air, Fire are complemented by poetic photographs, produced, as we learn from the Acknowledgements, by "Ramona, Emi, and Flaviu", which attempt an interdisciplinary connection to interiority, a preverbal linkage between nature and the unconscious.
Noemina Câmpean (read full review Hyperboréen sau stările legendare ale ființei)
Daniela Nicolaescu's debut collection is a stirring ethereal whirlwind that remains rooted in the earth, corporeal. It is a bilingual edition, in English and French, but as a "free translation" (as the author terms it), almost entirely translated by Nicolaescu. It is divided into parts, Earth, Water, Air, Fire; and the fast-paced movement continues through raw earthly experience, watery furlings, twisting back and forth, airy imagining, fiery feeling. It assembles poems over a decade of writing, from 2012 to 2023, across Romania, Italy, England and France. Collected across many years, and across diverse locations, the poems reflect on versions of the self across time, and the person that moves forward, containing or dismissing the voices, memories, experiences of before. It considers the natural change and continuity happening to the individual on a universal basis. The poems are also very much contemporary, reflecting and speaking of our age.
Gertrude Gibbons read full review Through the visceral and dreamy: Daniela Nicolaescu's debut collection 'Hyperboréen' published on soanyway magazine
I've never been to Romania, nor do I know any Romanian in Spain, although there are more than half a million (there were almost a million, but many have returned as the economic situation has improved) but some of my favourite writers were born in that country, like Emil Cioran or Paul Celan. None of them wrote in Romanian, as natives of that Romance language with Slavic influence have shown a surprising dexterity in expressing themselves in other languages.
This linguistic polyglotism of Romanians endures to this day, and I've just finished reading Hyperborea, the first poetry book by Daniela Nicolaescu, a poet who writes, with complete naturalness, in three languages: Romanian, French and English.
Born in 1993 in Rădăuți, a small town a few kilometres from the border with Ukraine (and near Czernowitz where Celan was born), Nicolaescu is currently finishing her doctoral thesis at the University of Leeds on Romanian Jewish poets (Gherasim Luca, Isidore Isou and Tristan Tzara) who had the merit of being more innovative in French than the majority of native French writers. Nicolaescu is also in this poem that has taken almost a decade to write and which is articulated in four parts anchored by the four elements according to ancient physics: "Earth (2012-2015)", situated in Rădăuți, Bucharest and Bordeaux; "Water (2017)" in Italy; "Air (2018-2021)" in England and "Fire (2022-2023)" in Paris.
The land of the Hyperboreans was for the Greeks the northernmost known and, for Homer, coincided with present-day Romania. In this book it is part of a personal mythology linked to the snows of childhood, as anterior to that of the uprooting, marked by the temporary death of the father (expressed in "Search for the father") and the fundamental relationship with the mother, reflected in the memorable "M". There is an exquisite sensitivity and irony in these verses, as when she speaks of "my heart / an anti-stress ball / that trembles between your hands", and also the bitter cry of someone who, no matter how integrated into their new society, feels, as she says in "The distance to cross": "There is always a margin of error / an unpronounceable word / No one has pronounced you completely/ You live, unnameable/ in the middle of unnameable/ waves at the bottom of the ocean/ without a residence.
Mario Martín Gijón, read full review published in the Spanish-language newspaper 'El Periódico Extremadura'
