The Poet Gheorghe Ursu

Undoubtedly, Gheorghe Ursu was a genuine poet that - during his life - didn't have the proper notoriety. Both the booklet Always two, printed at "Litera" Publishing-House in 1971, and the posthumous poems forced to a categorical consideration.
Generally, the title of the first booklet suggested the nature of Gheorghe Ursu's lyricism: it is a poetry on the eternal topic of love, which - choosing the classic form, usually, the fix form of sonnet - becomes a typical madrigal lyricism, as it expressed in the untitled sonnet that begins with the verse: The hazard is bird of your own hatching. Its feature consists in the vast perspective, at cosmic size, in which the erotic adventure occurs: the couple is neither archetypal, nor individualistic, but somehow elementary that is, the Eros is a drama played by two primordial principles - for instance, the earth and the water. In the poem "The enemy of love", the poet counts the opponents of his implacable propensity and he is sentencing above ages: my unbroken love/that neither tertian reptiles could deny/ nor blow full of lots contrary news/nor mafia of perjury glasses/nor daybreaks which plunder the gods from forests. At other times, the writer, in his passional "attack", aiming to "brake" the "alien" redoubt, calls a biblical term: Come, you, trumps of Ierihon…It is a kind of expressionist unbinding of time and space stimulated by the meting with a woman body, restricted to its fragile lines; the passion is coalescing the species and is mixing the dull real with the sublime imaginary: you are so young and boundless/and therefore your magnetic field grasps the carnivore plants and the heraldic doves/ any death begins in love/ and dies in don Quixote's mil… An eternal pendulum between "triumph and disappear" (the poem "I kiss your"), the passionate soul is something to which "the boon of stars blows out", "that climbs the gods' Golgota", and the loved one appears to poet as "a dark afternoon".
The oxymoron is not a gratuitous choice, because the love ecstasy reassembles sometimes as a destructive action on the object of adoration: the lust goes together with an delctatio morosa, the deadly supreme fulfillment: the face form the dream I burned with heavy water/ And - cruelly - where the acid didn't reach/ On crags, on eyes between the thick eyebrow/ I put some gray over the color. The mannerist expression are present in this epithalamium, in which the force is substituted with details and refinement, the gracious calligraphy: it is the case of another untitled sonnet: A gentle rains seems to lie on your face/Majuscule as in Cellini's hand/Is only rain or in this moment lion/Are curves' movements generating life? The first volume expresses a strong good quality surrealism, which proves modern poetical readings, a propensity to lucidity, from subtle verbal games to surprising inter-textual results for those years.
Now, Gheorghe Ursu's writing appears more as a calm and poise writing, more as a "classic" one: with that -remembered above-disillusioned refinement (with the needles winded up, the clock is sewing/ A daily clock-of ours. And a cigarette) which undoubtedly is a sign of modernity. This position saves the poet from any kind of sentimentalism. Because Gheorghe Ursu is essentially a bountiful sentimental poet, but culture and taste sheltered him by the expression's triteness.
The model of his refinement can be found in the sonnet "Navona Square", a small lyric jewel, with gracious baroque insertions. His modernist expression, there are also certain instances in the poem "Always two", is exemplified by the poem "After the journey", the only poem that resembles, in some extent, with Constant Tonegaru's writing.
He was a martyr of Romanian people, fell in the fight against the most disgraceful tyranny of our history. Gheorghe Ursu - the charming and the spiritual Babu, for his friends - was not only an unyielding nature, by an exemplary fidelity in respect with the values in which he believed, but also a remarkable poet, to whom the posterity couldn't refuse anymore the crown he completely deserves.

Stefan Augustin Doinas