Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband
Lumen Poetry, 2003
Anne Carson’s book is what makes me look back and return to where poetry books await me to exert some form of fascination and spell. Some university professor, one of those who always harps on about neo-baroque writing and its closed lists, has drawn a line in the sand to denigrate a prosody and narrative style that has much more to do with Patterson’s WCW than with Lezama Lima. I understand this because every poet harbors a dark desire to see libraries burn in a new Alexandrian conflict, finally freeing themselves from the anguish of influences and the oppressive power of past greatness.
But this book. This book is born from a voice. A very original voice, shaped by the details that make it great and memorable. A book about lost love and the beauty that nestles in all loss, and the secret hope that emanates from every collapse. The gods are the masters of beauty, but the day after loss, the giants are made of clay.
I cannot imagine how many readers this book has had, probably far fewer than any best-selling collection of poems, or perhaps more than the latest secret poet of the circles where the sacred fire is kept alive. “There is too much of me in my writing,” Carson has said. We, her readers, understand this and affirm it and are grateful for it.
Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, Miami Century Fox
Akashic Books, 2017, bilingual edition
For Guido Ceronetti, poetry is that small private museum of minimal collages, of clippings, with which we try to defend ourselves from the enormous, from the visible power of man, which crushes us. In Legna’s case, poetry does not reveal itself until the words collide. Play and fire are two contiguous words; playing with fire is a warning, a call not to do something.
In her poetry, words look each other in the face because they rebel, they play with each other. The twists of language that leave their mark and tell of the journey, of Miami, of Providence, Anglo turns, Spanglish, H&M, Coral Gables, Calle Ocho, but since nothing exists without its mirror as a torrent of memory and past, Camagüey and Havana, that is, Cuba, spring forth with similar naturalness in these sonnets and in those brief texts that, like epigraphs, head each page.
Legna’s books arrive punctually every year and are certainly never a slight shock (contrary to Lezama’s “premise for a slight shock” when writing about Montego Bay), but rather a tremor, an unexpected detour.
Carme López Mercader, Duelo sin brújula
Reino de Redonda, 2024
Some critics consider this a brave book, but I think it’s best approached without high expectations. It’s clear that, after Marías’ death, the author felt that a world had ended for her. She was working at Jorge Herralde’s publishing house in a non-literary capacity when she met the novelist. The break between Marías and Anagrama was well known, but there is no mention of it here.
The book contains little of the shared world of words, films, spaces, logistics, repeated jokes, and private codes that the critic has seen. If any writer was jealous of his privacy, it was Marías (what did we know about him? Not much: he wrote on an electric Lettera typewriter, he was the son of Julián Marías, he didn’t usually have an idea in mind when he sat down to write his next novel, he translated from English, he was a smoker, and a few other generalities such as that he lived in Madrid; apparently no one knew that he had married the author two years earlier), and his widow respects his privacy almost without exception. Some pages can be read diagonally. It’s all very veiled.
I’m surprised that some people compare it to The Year of Magical Thinking, one of the monuments of what we might call “essays on grief,” a testimony of the highest intensity that also includes the death of a daughter. We were all surprised by Marías’ death in the prime of his writing career, and I would have liked to read about those last days, but none of that appears here either.
