Specifi c for the poetry of Dumitru Matcovschi from his poetry books in the late ’60s is ostentation of the folklore, deliberate display, with respect to challenge, of demonstrative rusticity. The poet makes folklore his program. Beyond doinas and the tang for the passing of time and human, after a careful reading we fi nd in his poetry defensive strategies of a „small” world in the „terror of history”, with all appropriate aesthetic and emotional consequences. The deep antithesis of both worlds, the incongruence of their space and moral dimensions is relevant. It imposes irreducible situations and behavior. Destructive signs of history are seen in the images of moral deviance, which, in time, become a cancerous devastating presence. The perception of this ubiquity of evil personifi ed by the history of „Cain’s family”, is expressed in the poetry of the late ’80s in tragic-messianic feeling called „the disease of Bessarabia” by the poet. It’s a radicalized to the limit feeling, varying between vitriolic outbursts of anger, sarcasm, fi ercely satirical and bitter taste of emptiness and futility, ending, in the last books, with Bacovian weeping of pain or silent prayers fi lled with boundless thirst for faith.