The Shapes Are Real

“The exquisite arrangement of sculpture and poetry in this book offers such a profound experience of both pleasure and spiritual depth that I am left almost at a loss for words. In the time you spend with the book, you will find an alternative to the trivial and the terrible that sometimes seem to dominate current American life. Like me, maybe you, too, will pick this book up over and over to re-experience its breathtaking vision. Get two copies: one to keep and one to give to someone you love.”

Jeanne Murray Walker

“After living through communism and the Cold War, a time of suppression and restraint for artists, Liviu Mocan emerged stronger and more creative than ever. Now this pairing with the poet Jill Baumgaertner gives a buoyant example of the power of art set free. Poets compress meaning into words on a flattened page. Sculptors search for new media—wood, brass, marble, bronze, gold, iron, sandstone, walnut, oak—to express the same truth in multiple shapes. Together, they offer a feast for the eyes and the mind.”

Philip Yancey

“Philosophers have written entire libraries about the unity between image and word. In the verses of the American poet and in the sculptures of the Romanian artist, we have a happy creative affinity, springing from a spiritual affinity and from the same Christian ideals. The whole world tends in the soul of the two authors towards the heights, towards the throne of the Creator. Elevated forms, ascensional momentum, religiosity, which sustain spiritual burning, praise of those who long for the peace beyond nature, the peace that the Lord gives.”

Adrian Popescu

“Adam, the firstborn, not from the womb but from clay, animated with divine breath, is given the amazing task of naming creation. How did words come to be placed, in the beginning, next to each reality, each creature, each feeling . . . ? I cannot help but think that it was a coincidence. Perhaps the poetic side that humanity has never lost was revealed to Adam then. And then, a thought comes to me, that some of Adam’s descendants are divided into two: those who create images and forms and those who feel the need to decipher them through words, sometimes giving birth to poetry.”

Virgil Scripcariu

“Words ‘can go only so far.’ Baumgaertner’s ekphrastic poetry and Liviu Mocan’s remarkable sculpture reach toward ‘the ladder’s top,’ ‘suggest what lies beyond / what lies ahead.’ Beautifully produced, the book’s poems and sculpture enhance appreciation of their shared vertical, heavenward thrust. Each adroitly interweaves images of creation, planting, and crucifixion. Each is ‘always about ascending.’ What ‘we cannot do . . . / ourselves’ this marriage of sculpture and poetry facilitates in a book for pondering, prayer, and praise.”

Bonnie Thurston

“Jill Peláez Baumgaertner’s poems in The Shapes Are Real are moving meditations inspired by the work of Romanian sculptor Liviu Mocan. Like the shapes this book celebrates, Baumgaertner’s poems present themselves almost as three-dimensional objects, intricately-made linguistic engines that generate energy implicit in the art the poet beholds. Images of ladders, pillars, and crosses abound, moving the earthbound reader’s gaze upward towards the infinite and the (im)possible: ‘We stand in earth, in dust, / and reach for shapes / we see through mist.’ The vertical thrust of Baumgaertner’s powerful lyrics reminds us that words, like the Word himself, serve as both means of conveyance and destination, and constitute a kind of parousia. The fortunate reader realizes, to paraphrase the words of Emily Dickinson, surely one of the tutelary spirits of this volume, ‘instead of getting to heaven, at last--/ we’re going, all along.’”

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

“The Shapes are Real is not merely a book of poetry, nor, even less, a sculpture catalog rendered in verse. Rather, it is a composite experience in which two creative presences—the sculptor and the poet—deliberately renounce the self-sufficiency of their respective languages and choose instead to inhabit a liminal space: one where form becomes spirit, and the word—a subtle material. Liviu Mocan does not offer recognizable objects, but ontological markers. His sculptures do not illustrate a vision—they contain it. They are signs, spiritual gestures embodied in metal, in wood, in stone, but most of all, in absence—because at the heart of each volume lies a dense silence, an unspoken question. Within this space open to the vertical, Jill Peláez Baumgaertner arrives not to explain, nor to extol, but to listen and respond—with a poetry that refuses spectacle yet seeks at every turn a quiet revelation. This book thus becomes not a juxtaposition of art forms, but a convergence of intuitions. Not a tandem, but a deep accord. Here, sculpture is no pretext, and poetry no reflection; they coexist as two hemispheres of the same act of faith—that beyond the visible, beyond the contingent, there exists a beauty that redeems, a shape that cannot be undone. A book about ascension—not through escape, but through a deepening into the real form of things.”

Pavel Șușară