Exile, family, and the survival of love are all topics explored in this collection of poetry. Born in Romania, Carmen Bugan's verse is rooted in her experience of Eastern Europe in the mid-1980s as a child of political dissidents and an exile from her native country. Her pieces skillfully interweave the emotions of crossing countries and languages with loss, celebration, and the reconciliation of memory with dreams.

Poetry born of historical upheaval bears witness both to actual historical events and considerations of poetics. Under the duress of history the poet, who is torn between lamentation and celebration, seeks to achieve distance from his troubled times. Add to this a deep love for and commitment to the Irish and English poetic traditions, and a strong desire to search for models outside his culture, and you have the poetry of the Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney (1939-).
In this study, Carmen Bugan looks at how the poetry of Seamus Heaney, born of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, has...

In 1989 the five members of the Bugan family were allowed to leave Ceau escu's Romania with one suitcase each and death-threats in their wake. In 2010 the poet Carmen Bugan took possession of 1,500 pages of Securitate files on her father and in 2013 a further 3,000 pages of secret files on her mother, sister, brother and herself. Releasing the Porcelain Birds is about the transformation of that extraordinary history of Cold War Europe into poetry; it is about writing the self free and how poetry drawn in a new and tender narrative can do this. In this manner Releasing the Porcelain Birds is...