Nina Cassian's Selected Poems is a wonderful collection of her work, translated by some other great poets and translators (Richard Wilbur, Dana Gioia, William Jay Smith, and Carolyn Kizer). This collection isn't just about the art of poetry, it is about the art of translation. I wish there had been biographical notes on the translators, but other than that, it's a wonderful collection. I recommend it.

Nina Cassian's poetry is some of the most extraordinary to emerge from Eastern Europe in many years, and American readers can thank editor and translator William Jay for putting together this collection of samples of Cassian's best work, including some translations by the author herself. A resident of the United States since 1985, having been exiled from her own country, Nina Cassian is a poet who is both academic and accessible. Her fluid, easily grasped metaphors and poetic leaps have a charm which sets her apart from her more obscure, less emotional contemporaries.

Nina Cassian was born in Romania in 1924, published her first poems there in 1947, fled the Ceausescu regime in 1985 and since then has become well-known in the English-speaking world. For this selection of her poems Cassian worked closely with Brenda Walker on the translations / rewritings in English. This is recognisably modernist work: oblique, fragmentary, not always obvious. As modernist poetry, however, it is relatively accessible. Always latent in these pieces is a quality of humourous self-deprecation that can, at moments, crystallise in poems of amusing simplicity. Cassian gives us the voice of a poet who sometimes does not understand herself or what she is doing ('I am the Monkey Who is Sentenced to Write'), but who equally is sure that she is just a simple woman who does not mean to threaten or intimidate ('My tongue - forked like a snake's / but without deadly intentions: / just a bilingual hissing'). Cassian's world is a place of potential terror and confusion ('Huge agitated creatures / haunt my window') but she uses her poems to keep hold of a dry, humourous spirit that is both resigned and defiantly optimistic; she is particularly good at conjuring up the image of herself as battered and worn but nevertheless unapolagetically sensual ('my cigarette's ash falling on my naked thighs'). Cassian's poetry is very much the language of a survivor (and it always helps to remember the horrific circumstances of her life in Romania and enforced exile). If it has modernism's obscurity and perhaps a certain gaucheness more particular to her, it despite this is convincingly tough, hard-won and often daringly whimsical.

I recently discovered Nina Cassian, and I love her work. I've found her to be a wonderful poet. In her own language. Rather, translated from Romanian. I very happily sat down with this collection, ready to dive into poems that are beautiful, musical, and important pieces. What I found were trivial poems that tried to be playful and musical, but came across flat. They struck me as trite, and what is really sad is that I probably give the book more credit because of my respect for her and her earlier work. I say pick up _Life Sentence_ because that is the Nina Cassian we all know and love. (Oh, this collection does contain her translation of Jabberwocky into Romanian, but since I don't know how to pronounce the Romanian alphabet, it is just something to look at and not something you can really appreciate hearing. There is also her poem "Impreciation" in something called "English Spargan" which is her Jabberwockish made up language, and instead of being fresh and interesting, it seems rather embarassing. Maybe it comes across better in the origianl "Sparga Romana".)