This is a daybook for the soul. Each poem offers the calm in which it is possible to believe again we are held from oblivion by a great sustaining, divine tenderness. Liliana Ursu has always been a magical poet. Her talismanic wild strawberries mark our paths like small offerings of prayer where we forage in our seeking not to be abandoned. Reading her poems I felt both sheltered and spiritually empowered. --Tess GallagherClay and Star offers a brilliant cross-section of poems across Liliana Ursu's thirteen books, brought into English by skilled translator and poet Mihaela Moscaliuc. Moscaliuc's translations showcase Ursu's incredible lyricism. Ursu's poems 'spark' into being, they "dig words out of silence" with spareness and deceptive simplicity.

A poem will appear to be sketching a particular place or a small moment plucked from the everyday, when suddenly a shift will occur--a subtle turn of thought, a leap of image will move its register toward mystery and matters of the spirit. Always--and Moscaliuc's translations capture this beautifully--Ursu is a poet of incandescent language, illuminating the things of this world so we may see our lives adorned. --Shara McCallum, MadwomanIn Liliana Ursu's Clay and Star we enter a world of nature infused with myth and magic, where stillness is "the scent of dusking fields," and "poems spill out" of the pocket of a man "stooping under the weight of his blueberry basket;" a place where night is a "key rusting on the floor of the sea," and footprints are "quickly erased by birds." In the masterful hands of poet and translator Mihaela Moscaliuc, these poems infuse the air with prayers where "the ratio between joy and sorrow approaches harmony." --Sholeh Wolpé, Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths.