Ion Pop, Cărţi La Alegere. Poeţi Şi Poezie, Editura Tracus Arte, Bucureşti, 2020

Ion Pop’s most recent book, Cărţi la alegere with its subtitle Poeţi şi poezie (Tracus Arte Publishing, 2020) represents more than the title makes is believe, more than what the poet himself says. The book brings together the literary reviews published by Ion Pop in different cultural magazines between 2000 and 2019, exposing before the readers a series of “fragmented readings” dependant to a great extent on the editorial context of these years. The critic, an “active spectator” of the Romanian literary scene, admits his inappetence for the often confusing image of the backstage, of biased manoeuvres, movements and image strategies, preferring, as he writes in the Foreword, to be left “alone with the texts and texts alone”. On the other hand, one cannot ignore the ambition of his thesis, as Ion Pop confesses his “secret impulse of fitting a mosaic piece of these types of glosses in a more comprehensive assembly”, capable of highlighting the “figure in the carpet” “calling to unity the capillaries of the entire organism”.