Ursu's book focuses on a place that is at once a literary crossroads and at the same time isolated in the Carpathian mountains. The eighty poems that make up the three sections of Goldsmith Market are all marked with the longing for travel. The first section, unnamed, presents a series of portraits and scenes, from Nobel Prize winners to busboys, all uneasy in their present place. “False Landscapes,” the second section, explores the images of the Mediterranean we receive through writers such as Sappho and Cavafy, and shows us how isolated we are from the actual places by the mythology surrounding Carthage, Lesbos, and Alexandria. In the third section, “Goldsmith Market,” Ursu follows the connections between Sibiu's history as a meeting place for poets and its contemporary location, with the same attention to distance and longing. The three sections are united by Ursu's interest in precise, provocative portraiture.
 
#5 Mint Street
In Alexandria a red cat
in the window of a sick poet
and books sadder than the sea under fog.
Wild dogs bark in his brain
At another window, the bourgeois dine
clinking glasses, white bones on china plates
whiter than the bones of a drowned man...
On a blue chair a flickering candle
All that remains after paying his creditors here
and in Hell.
No one whispers his name.
There is no one.
In Alexandria a red cat
in the window of a sick poet…
 
 
Romanian poet Liliana Ursu was born in 1949. She was a Fulbright fellow at Pennsylvania State University in 1992 and 1997. Goldsmith Market is Liliana Ursu's third book of poetry in Romanian, and her third book to appear in English (after two anthologies, The Sky behind the Forest [Bloodaxe] and Angel Riding a Beast [Northwestern UP]). It is also the first translation of an entire book as it appeared in Romanian. Three poems have appeared in Sean Cotter's translation in the journal Beacons, and two poems from this book were included in The Sky behind the Forest (“Rain in Sibiu” and “In the Town that Was”), both of which appeared, translated by Ursu, Adam Sorkin, and Tess Gallagher, in The New Yorker.
 
Sean Cotter is the translator of many works of Romanian literature, and Professor of Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. His translation of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (Deep Vellum, 2022) was awarded the Dublin Literary Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Romanian Cultural Institute prize for best translation of the year. Other books have won or been short-listed for numerous other awards. In addition to Goldsmith Market, Cotter has translated Kaddish, by Radu Vancu (2026), and Lightwall, also by Liliana Ursu (2009), for Zephyr Press.