Interview with Mihaela Moscaliuc, author of Heartmoor

Recently, Rachel Morgan, an Editor at the North American Review, sat down with Mihaela Moscaliuc, author of Heartmoor--now out at Alice James Books--to talk about the collection, writing in a different language, and sources of inspiration. 

Q. Reading through the table of contents is like a poem itself. There are so many novel closed compound words such as “Fellchaser,” “Offtides,” and “Énouement.” These words–which are from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows–are created by fusing two words to create a new one, such as "Heartmoor--from heart + moor, to tie a boat to the anchor” (Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, 151). How did The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows influence your thinking about language in general and the poems in this collection?  

A. Koenig’s book was a gift from my close friend Diana Catargiu who, like me, emigrated from Romania and lives in Canada. We are both exophonic writers (writers who’ve come to English from the outside/who’re writing outside our mother tongue), hyperaware of the tensions between fluency and disfluency and how such tensions operate at linguistic and socio-cultural levels. We communicate in Anglo-Romanian, which is how Andrei Codrescu describes his brand of hybrid language, and have a lot of fun with the linguistic mongrels that crop up along the way. We also delight in how code-switching and meshing reveal both the resourcefulness and inexhaustibility of our languages, as well as how confined and at times confining they can be. I fell in love with Koenig’s Dictionary right away. He is offering new words that are “stitched together from fragments of a hundred different languages, both living and dead” so we may "translate" or find linguistic shortcuts for emotions for which we didn’t have a single word. Memories, images, snippets of conversation came to mind as I read about and sat briefly with each word. Some seeped into drafts, and some of those drafts turned into poems. The correspondence between the Koenig words that lend eight poems their title (and the collection its title) and the poems themselves may not be obvious. In some cases, as with the word “rasque,” the sonic suggestiveness of the word served as a portal to the writing, a bridge to it. Thank you, John Koenig, for these suspension bridges.     

Q. I’m thinking of your “Deep Cut” poems that offer a snapshot of Romania during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s last decade of rule and the decade to follow. Some of these poems juxtapose Romania then to Romania now, almost forty years after his removal from power. During his rule, food and goods were rationed; neighbors were not to be trusted. You write, “how private means public” and “as if any door or wall was made for not listening.” These poems are in the same vein as Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky’s work. You write personal poems that are also intensely political. Do you think of these poems as political?

A. I do think of these poems as political, though not so much while I’m writing them. The need to write comes from multiple sources, and while many early instantiations emerge from anger and frustration, few make it into drafts I decide to stay with and carry through. Sometimes the anger exceeds the capacity of the poem, or rather my capacity to alchemize it into a poem. That’s how the centerpiece of Heartmoor, which is written in prose, came about. It began as a poem in the months following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but I felt overwhelmed by the demands of memories and voices that returned to me, wanting a more expansive form of articulation.

Q. English is a second language for you, and in a poem, you write, “We watch from the doorstep in almost silence because only Romanian rushes to my rescue when too excited.” You also provide Romanian terms for words, such as in the poem “Offtides”: “perdele (translucent), draperii (opaque).” How do your native language and English influence your writing and thinking about language?  

A: I’ve been living mostly in English for thirty years, but my parents live exclusively in Romanian, in Romania. Although I’ve unfortunately lost my claim to my mother tongue, I remain strongly connected to it affectively, which means that whenever I experience any emotional fluctuation, whether excitement, annoyance, or even a drop of nervousness, I can quickly lose my bearings in English, my accent thickens, and my adopted tongue becomes vulnerable to accidents. My writing is strongly connected to my need and desire (and I don’t know which came first) to fashion a self and a life in my adopted language and to make sense of my being in the world in a language that feels at once intimate and distant. But my English remains deeply inflected by my Romanianness, if not my Romanian, and ultimately the two are inextricable. 

I love the fact that everyone (except Romanian speakers) reads the parentheses in “perdele (translucent), draperii (opaque)” as translations of the two Romanian terms. They are not, and I’m aware of how this creates confusion, and that’s ok. It was a disbalance I became aware of only during the revision process, and I decided not to change it. I liked the soundwork, and keeping the asymmetry felt right, a gift I was giving myself. Perdele are sheer /transparent curtains and draperii are blackout/ opaque curtains. In communist Romania we layered them, and when my parents said Trage perdelele, it wasn’t the same as Trage draperiile; it was more than light that we blocked out. These two ordinary words carried connotations that would have been lost in translation.

Q. While many of the poems contain stark images and historic events surrounding Romania’s authoritarian government, there are also gentle and passionate love poems, like “Vows” and “April 2020” that percolate throughout the collection. How did you balance this range across the collection?   

A. I write in spurts, in intense 2-3 week periods, and I do it poem by poem, without an arc or book structure in mind, which makes the presence of tenderness all but inevitable. I would not be able to write the starkness without coming up for air, and more than coming out for air, without celebrating. Though my poems span mostly a somber palette, I wouldn’t have been able to write them without love, without the loving. I hope that comes through somehow even in the darkest pieces.   

Q. You have a cluster of poems with mangoes in them, including “Allergy” and “The Politics of Mangoes,” which are serious, sensuous, and historic. When you were ordering poems for Heartmoor, how did these poems come to their placement? As you were writing, how did the mangoes start appearing, and how did you nurture that generative motif? 

A. Heartmoor contains four poems about mangoes, which surprises me, since it’s not a fruit with which I have much history, the way I do with quinces or cherries. Although only two of the poems are set in the Dominican Republic, all four were ‘conceived’ while living there for seven months during the pandemic with my husband, poet Michael Waters, and our thirteen-year-old son. I was overwhelmed by the abundance and variety of mangos, and became attentive to them in ways I might not have under normal circumstances. The kinship I developed with this fruit is embedded in memories of the amalgamated emotions associated with quarantining on this semi-deserted spit of the Samaná peninsula, with all our friends and family oceans away. Unabating fear and worry coexisted with deep sensory delights, and mangoes reigned supreme. We consumed them in every way possible and the piles still never diminished. To many locals, they had been a main source of income, but all tourists and most expats had left.  The Dominican mangos called forth other mangos, casting a net into the past and across the ocean in search of connections. That’s how the cluster came about.     

Q. In the middle of the collection, a longer prose poem, “Extractions” flashes to different years in the 1980s when young women were routinely examined for pregnancy, because of the ordered population growth which made abortions and contraception illegal: “The dictators’ largesse is killing women right and left.” Can you talk about the choice to use prose for this really powerful poem? 

A. “Extractions” began as a poem written in response to the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, but there were too many memories that claimed a space in it, so I let go of lineation and subsumed other craft elements into the storytelling. The truth is that I have only a vague memory of writing the piece. I was in the throes of COVID when I returned to the poem draft. Over the four days I spent in bed, it became “Extractions.” I care deeply about my lines and linebreaks and about crafting small containers for my poems, but I must have felt too weak and too angry at what was happening under the Trump administration to care about any of that then.      

Q. In the acknowledgements, you mention loving Abercrombie's “Untitled (Lady with Cat),” at first sight, and you chose it as a cover for Heartmoor. How do you see this painting in conversation with the poems in Heartmoor?

A. I was not familiar with Gertrude Abercrombie’s work before coming across this particular piece online, but the  moment I saw it, I thought, “That’s it, that’s what I want to do in my poems; this is heartmoor.” The tension between being moored and the need to unmoor, the starkness of the composition, the music of it–I don’t know, it’s hard to articulate that moment of recognition. And I felt it before I even noticed the black cat. That cat…. I had just finished “Watching Killing Eve,” an attempt at a villanelle about my black cat and my infatuation with the sociopathic assassin Villanelle (Jodi Comer in Killing Eve). It was as if I had been writing toward that painting. Since then, I’ve learned a lot more about Abercrombie and her work, and the affinity has only grown. She once commented, “I am not interested in complicated things nor in the commonplace, I like to paint simple things that are a little strange.” A door, two nails pinning hair and dress, body in motion, restrained but not in distress, a black cat, the interplay of shapes and colors: that’s mostly it, but together they do so much work, and the strangeness feels earned, emplaced. Maybe that’s what I aspire to in my own work. 

Q. In the end of Heartmoor, ancestors and descendants appear, so does death, but in the form of chocolate and fungi. Rightly, I think, poets are often attributed to writing or thinking about death. Do you think that’s true?  

A. In Economy of the Unlost, Anne Carson talks of the poet as “someone who saves and is saved by the dead,” and attributes this in part to the poet’s view of reality, “a view that sees death everywhere and finds life within, a view that perceives presence as absence and finds a way to turn the relation inside out.” I feel connected to my ancestors and also to my descendants through death, through the process of remembering and wanting to be remembered, and see myself as an individual only if I can think of myself as part of this continuum. I come from a culture that is ‘tight’ with the dead, in the sense that we value being in the proximity of our dead and spend a good amount of time in cemeteries,  talking about the departed, or tending to the dying. Writing about death and imagining ways of dying brings me joy, in the sense that I feel fully alive then and lucky, oh so lucky. 

Q. Follow up on the question above. The poems at the end time travel in two directions: the past (ancestors) and the future (children). How do lyrical forms like odes, elegy, and dirges help you write these kinds of poems? 

A. Thank you for this observation. I hadn’t noticed that, but now that you mention it, I see how it relates to my earlier comment that the self makes sense to me only through its situatedness within a continuum. In other words, the self is relational, inextricable from the past for sure, but also entangled/ or implicated in what happens after I’m gone. 

I think of contemporary odes and elegies as being two ways of approaching the same thing, just as I see death-thinking as a way of thinking about life. Dirges I see as laments and rituals of mourning, funeral rites. In a dirge, you inhabit the keening.  

Let’s close the interview with three classic and quick questions!

Q. What poem arrived most easily, and why do you think that’s the case? 

A. The opening poem, “Heartmoor” felt like one of those gifts that Maxine Kumin taught me to accept without questions, bow in gratitude, and move on. 

Q. Besides Jean Valentine, who were you reading while writing this collection? 

A. Way too many poets to mention here. I worked on these poems over the course of four years, which means I wrote and revised them primarily during my 2019-2020 sabbatical and at summer retreats, while reading intensively in between. My husband Michael Waters and I have about a dozen books come into the house every month, either purchased or gifted by friends, as well as several journals. I also subscribe to all the books published by Alice James Books and read them as they arrive. I would be too annoyed with myself if I left out by accident some of the poets or works, so I’d rather not list names.

Q. Who are you reading currently? 

A. I’m reading Anna Journey’s Wolf Cut: New and Selected and Isabella DeSendi’s Someone Else’s Hunger, and loving them. I’m also halfway through two memoirs in Romanian (by Stelian Tanase and Valeriu Ernu), and dipping in and out of Roger Luckhurt’s Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead. Yesterday, I re-read part of Judith Vollmer’s The Pavese Stone while waiting for my friend Dorothy Doyle, for whom I had brought a copy of the book as a gift to celebrate her first collection, Emerald Echoes. And just as I am typing this, an early copy of Michael’s Pagan Sky: New and Selected Poems 2020-2025 arrives, and I’m excited to spend time with it.