"Connections" by Mihai Brinas

Nine short stories comprise the collection Connections by writer and poet Mihai Brinas. Yet to call them stories is to do them a disservice; they are also poems, or include poems, that make up an integral part of each tale.  

The stories seem simple, but deceptively so. “Path to Anywhere,” for example, is about watching trains that pass without stopping, until the day when one with only a single passenger car halts at the platform. And a journey begins.

 

“The Drawing” concerns a woman condemned to life imprisonment for being a witch, until another prisoner devises an extraordinary means of escape. In “The Crystal Ball,’ the fortune teller places a towel over her head, and disappears, with her client left wondering where he is. “Paintings” might be better titled as “the fishing settlement at the end of the world.”

 

Mihai Brinas

“Connections,” the title story, is about a patient discharged from what seems to have been a mental hospital. But the state of his clothes and shoes suggests that the former patient might not have been officially discharged. In “The Bait,” a couple on a fishing vacation at a lake are the victims of a crime – and how justice gets ultimately served. “Introspection” concerns a writer who tries to help a neighbor deal with the abduction of her daughter, who had been trying to buy a specific brand of oil paint. And then the story becomes circular – and a story about a story. 

 

“Werewolves” is about a man who keeps finding his garden disturbed and damaged by a large animal, and he hears the stories about werewolves on the prowl. And “The Nightmare” tells a dark tale of a police officer on his way home who hits a barn owl – and how his life changes. 

 

Brinas’ poetry collections are Alignment of Thoughts, Crossroads, Thoughts That Bring Us Closer, and Invitation to Poetry. Born and raised in Romania, he lives in the city of Arad in the western part of the country, not far from the Hungarian border.

 

These stories are all jarring, slightly offbeat, and sometimes disturbing. They invite you to reconsider the reality you know while they rather poetically ask, “What if?”

 

Related:

 

Invitation to Poetry by Mihai Brinas.

“Invitation to Poetry” by Mihai Brinas

Twenty-five-year-old poet Mihai Brinas lives in Romania and has already published four collections of poetry, including Invitation to Poetry, his most recent. Brinas write poetry in English, and he writes about love, poetry, jealousy, imagination, the passing of time, and life. 

It’s unusual to see contemporary poets write love poems, and yet that’s what comprises a significant portion of this new collection. He considers the clumsy first stages of love, the first kiss, how a relationship develops, the depth of passion, and more. This focus on love even spills into the more general journey of life poems he includes. There is something innately appealing, and rather refreshing, about a poet writing on love – the theme poets have written about for millennia. 

All of his poems are written in lower case and without punctuation. He uses line breaks to provide order and coherence. This suggests a kind of humility – something else not usually associated with contemporary poets. He writes with a crispness and simplicity that holds your attention to the words; only after do you realize that something deeper was being communicated. Consider this poem, one of the “non-love” poems in the collection.

searching for the light

have not hidden my eyes

from any sunrise

i hide my eyes

every sunset instead

i can hear the light crumble

when the night falls

i can hear it fall into pieces

that is why i avert my eyes

i am trying to collect

the remains of the light

just like a child

collecting from the dust

shards of colored glass

fantasizing they are precious stones

Mihai Brinas

This is a “life” poem, or a “searching for life” poem. The poet distinguishes between the light of sunrise, or beginnings, and the light of sunset, or endings. He’s firmly fixed on the light from the sunrise. But both kinds of light turn out to be fragmentary, and he finds himself trying to collect the remains of light in the dust, those “shards of colored glass” that he wants to believe are precious stones. And that suggests the underlying theme of the poem – is this a search for the real or for the ephemeral? The poet is an idealist here; he keeps searching because he still believes.

Brinas’ previous poetry collections are Alignment of Thoughts, Crossroads, and Thoughts That Bring Us Closer. Born and raised in Romania, he lives in the city of Arad in the western part of the country, not far from the Hungarian border.

If I had to use one word to describe Invitation to Poetry, that word would have to be enchanting. The poems have freshness and vitality. They’re fully recognizable across cultures as poems of love and life. And they remind us of what’s important and what matters.

Top photograph by Nathan McBride via Unsplash. Used with permission.