Nobel Prize Candidate - Alexa Gavril Bale

The poetry volume Nobel Prize Candidate by the Romanian contemporary poet Alexa Gavril Bale invites the reader to step into a very personal lyrical universe, with profound emotions and sharp poetic visions. Romanian literary critics love this poet and praise his work.

Mix of the Telluric and the Intellectual

One evening, a few years ago, in the literary and plastic creation camp of Ocolis, near Baia-Mare – a camp organized by the inexhaustible multilateral artist Ioan Marchis; a camp whereupon sat to write and to rest a number of the lots of petals of the famous ’80s flower generation (among them: Alexandru Vlad, Ion Muresan, Ioan S. Pop, Lucian Perta, George Tara and in his last trip through Maramures, Augustin Fratila and Constantin Stan) – Alexa Gavril Bale was reading poetry. I didn’t know anything about him, except that he was a vet for several Maramures villages and some kind of „sponsor” of the manifestation, bringing the natural products of sheep, cow and pork.

He began reading and from the first lines, Ion Muresan and I were both impressed by the strength of the images and the verbs, which reminded us of a young Ioan Alexandru. But – fatality! – hardly had he finished reading two of his poems when his mobile on the table rang. Unruffled, he stopped his reading, answered the call and from what he said we understood that it was some kind of veterinary emergency: somewhere, something was happening, a cow was trying to give birth – if my memory serves me right – and the villager needed counseling, which the poet gave on the spot.

After another 2–3 splendid poems, the mobile rang again: another possible tragedy that needed his intervention, at least by phone, from the specialist.

And it’s exactly what happened. I confess that, beyond the humor of the situation, I was impressed by this fortuitous mix of the telluric and the spiritual, of the material and the evanescent: from its high miraculous spheres, the poetry was forced to come back to the ground, probably on the floor of some stable, where, in fact another miracle was born, that of a live being.