In Fidelity

In In Fidelity: a beautiful defeat, Monica Bildea takes us on a journey through love, loss and recovery. Through raw imagery and sensuous language, Bildea builds a fragmented, emotional landscape of assertion and contradiction. Between the visceral imagery of poems such as Am I broken? (‘sometimes I feel fractured/a deep crack/between heart and mind/right along my spine.’) and the abstraction of others, such as, Not a game ( ‘I am sending/this ice storm/back to you;/it runs like/an animal,/like a dream/come true.’), the reader is plunged into a world of dark and light, heat and ice. Meanwhile, pieces about time and ageing remind us of the constant tension between the futile and our existential need to believe we are necessary and important: ‘I saw the time sliding into the past’ (from Imperfect). In Fidelity: a beautiful defeat is, above all, about the state of being human. It is a delicate, poignant, yet joyful celebration of what it means to love and to be loved, to betray and to mourn. Ultimately, with her collection of finely-wrought poems, Bildea challenges us to question what truth is and whether we might be lying to ourselves. Rosie Sandler, writer and editor