How to write about the intimate, the deeply personal, the body, without resorting to confession or to the kinds of detail that can seem almost pornographic?  In her newest book, Santo y Seña, Mexican poet Pura López Colomé writes her best poetry in a style which is less a refinement of how she wrote previously than a condensation of it.  The title of her collection gives us a clue to reading the poems.  While santo means saint and seña means sign, the phrase santo y seña means shibboleth or watchword.  So something important may be hidden, but key words will give us access. 

What comes clear to the reader quickly enough is that this isn’t a literary game, not even a means of self-protection for the author, so much as it is a mode of perceiving and experiencing trauma and love.  The poems are fierce and unapologetically earnest in their wrestling with ontological questions.

Take, for instance, the poem “Tormented.”  It reminds me of that unforgettable Fra Angelico fresco of Saint Dominic as he concentrates on reading an open Bible while all around him, Hell’s winged demons whirl through the air. Pura’s poem begins with objects falling through the air.  Not demons, but “solids.”  It is a more abstract nightmare that nevertheless provokes trembling and “an inky taste” in her mouth.  The following phrase, en su punto means on point, literally.  But Mexicans use the phrase to indicate something like all ready or just right.  When something is set to go, you might say, Esta en su punto.  Is the inky taste an indication that the speaker is hungry to write?  Other “watchwords” in the poem lead me to think the inky taste could be the bitter aftertaste of chemotherapy.  In which case the “En su punto,” ready, suggests a heightened attentiveness to what might come next.  

  

Like “King Lear,” “Tormented” is absorbed with what doesn’t come to pass, with nothing.  Hail doesn’t bury the speaker.  Monsters don’t show up.  Distances, brutalities, those sorts of things are notable only by their absence.  So why does the poet say that she’s left with “Only the agony of acorns”?  What’s so agonizing about acorns? 

Acorns, like little cancer cells.  Cells that transform one kind of forest into another.  The force of the poem remains implicit.  Its very lack of certainty, emphasized by the stop-and-go phrasing, matches the psychological state of the speaker.  And the isolated last line, double-spaced below the rest of the poem, turns an ordinary stanza break into an act of metastasis.

Translation’s gift is a strange one.  It is often, at its best, the gift of strangeness.  Pura López Colomé’s poetry isn’t familiar to us, but not only because we may not have encountered it earlier.  Rigorous conceptually and linguistically, it is distinctive from the work of her Mexican peers in its spiritual intensity and its twining of the sacred and profane. The emotional power of the poems is modulated by an unusually high level of (at times Kabbalistic) language play and hermeticism—a fact that draws comparisons of López Colomé’s poems to those of the incendiary and brilliant 17th century Mexican poet and nun, Sor Juana de la Cruz.  A first encounter with either’s work can be mystifying, even baffling, which is a good beginning.  I remember the art critic Peter Schendahl noted that our reaction to bad art is usually “Wow!  Huh?”  To good art: “Huh?  Wow!”  Watchword’s poems are of the second category.

In some ways, these poems are highly personal.  Watchword, which won “Mexico’s  Pulitzer,” the Villaurrutia Prize, in 2007, was written during a bleak period during which the author, diagnosed with cancer, submitted to sequential operations, radiation treatment, chemotherapy, and later reconstructive surgeries.  Her psychological outlook wasn’t upbeat.  She had suffered cancer earlier, in her adolescence.  This biographical information, which Pura reminds us in the Afterward is least relative to her poetry, does help orient the English-language reader who comes across poems with medical terms like fomite (which is material that transmits infection) or poems titled “Deep Wound” or “Almond” (if the reader also knows that cancer patients often consume bitter almonds therapeutically).

Perhaps the most clearly biographical poem is “My Life’s Portrait,” a poem that takes place in three “paintings.”  The first, “Woman Against a Green Background,” is a portrait of Pura’s mother who was, herself, a painter.  The second, “Waterworm Against a Blue Background,” depicts Pura as a child.  And the last, “Girl Against a Dark Background,” concerns the long-delayed moment when a painting by Pura’s mother, by then deceased, was mysteriously delivered to Pura’s house in a black plastic bag.  Given her own sensitive state, her haunted memories of her mother, and the symbolism of the black bag (which seems, in the breeze, to be breathing), Pura is almost too terrified to open it.  But the poem succeeds whether or not you know any of this background information.  The familial connections, the elements of narrative, and the biographical detail are liminal characteristics.  This poet is more interested in the way language is posed and disposed, in how musicality and syntactical tensions adjust to create, not merely describe, emotional situations. 

For Pura, the world is experienced through the word; we know the world and offer our accounts of it to each other in language.  And this phenomenological insistence takes on mystical dimensions.  The poems keep turning their undersides to us, flashing us with their source code—“syllables, diphthongs, hiatus”—and asking us to open up to experience, yes, but also to the language of experience—the linguistics of hearing, touching, remembering.  The way the poems do this is uncanny, profound, and distinguishes the work of Pura López Colomé from work by other contemporary poets—either in the United States or in Mexico. 

Her poetry may seem strange at first. And the first section of this book is the most abstract.  But strangeness is just the opening gambit.  To read this book is to go through something that leaves a permanent mark on you.  Only the difficult, the great Cuban poet José Lezama Lima reminds us, is deeply stimulating.  Pura López Colomé’s poems give voice to a world familiar and odd, wounded and, particularly in third section, hopeful.  In the energy and intensity of her poems and in López Colomé’s attitude toward words, we discover both a line of conduct and the source for a richer life.