Antonio Gamoneda in Poetry Magazine
“The greatest living poet in the Spanish language.”
– Raúl Zurita
There’s an excerpt from Antonio Gamoneda’s masterpiece Burn the Losses (trans Hedeen and Rodriguez Nunez) now up on POETRY MAGAZINE:
It was
the music mortal, the shriek
of the incessant horses, was
a funeral pavane at the time
of the bloodied cotton.
Action Books is publishing it next spring. When I read the manuscript I couldn’t believe how good it was. As good as any book of poetry I have ever read - Celan, Keats, Jäderlund, etc. I loved his other work in translation (see for example Book of the Cold out from World Poetry), but I think this is the strongest and strangest.
The light boils beneath my eyelids. The first line of Gamoneda’s groundbreaking long poem announces that this is a poem of intensity. Both hermetic and powerfully affecting, both densely metaphoric and startingly physical, this book – consisting of four suites of short but powerful flares of poetry – chronicles memory and oblivion.
Gamoneda draws us into an immersive vision – shaped by a childhood spent during Spain’s civil war and a youth spent in the censorious dictatorship of Franco – that in its intensity and strangeness pushes back against dictatorships and other oppressive forces that seeks to flatten and reduce our experiences and language.
The book, oscillates between purity and filth, hope and darkness, the past and a vibrating lyrical present, refuses the simple answers. Gamoneda extolls the reader: “burn in me the meanings” and “let us burn in indecipherable words” and “Close my eyes/and burn the limits.” Poetry does not push back by making reality simple or propagandistic, but with a burning, radical “indecipherable” language, words made almost violently intense, words that push against the limit.
I wrote this post about the use of metaphors in Gamoneda and Tranströmer a while back.
Can’t wait for everyone to read the full book this spring from Action Books.