Monday, March 31, 2008

MAUVE SEA-ORCHIDS by LILA ZEMBORAIN

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Mauve Sea-Orchids by Lila Zemborain, Trans. by Monica de la Torre and Rose Alcala
(Belladonna Books, Brooklyn, 2007)

With the caveat that I don't have the knowledge to comment on the Spanish-to-English translation, let me cut to the chase on the English result: Mauve Sea-Orchids is one of the most gorgeous, stunning and impressive feats of a poetry collection I've read in a long while. It’s written by Argentine writer Lila Zemborain (it's her first full-length English poetry collection) and translated from the Spanish by Monica de la Torre and Rose Alcala, as well as published by the ever-innovative Belladonna Books -- kudos to all participants involved in releasing this project!

There's much to adore in Mauve Sea-Orchids. The writing is lush and sensuous, certainly, but these words don't really capture the effect of the poems, which is like the slow, pleasurable, highly-sensitized build up to an orgasm. Not the orgasmic conclusion itself, no. But the process towards it that one wishes never to end and, in this collection, continues on past the last page as a result of resonance. The poetry collection never concludes; its experience just lingers, stays!, for a long time until the reading experience transcends reading to become, in memory, like a bodily act one never forgets.

If I sound delirious, then that attests to the text's ability to have melted distance between my senses and the page -- like:
like the orchid patiently waiting for the bumble-
bee that will pollinate it, an unexpected wind
causes the flower of scents to burst open and
glands begin to secrete their effluvia so the
bumble-bee at celestial distances may perceive,
amid the night's fragrances, the intoxicating
substance; at the call of instinct it will fly
unaware of the destination of its random journey
until arriving at the site of the encounter; there,
beyond essences and circumstances, wrapped
in the scented sphere, they mate unknowingly,
because it is not their bodies that embrace and
touch, but the ethereal substance that overflows
and contains them....

You can open the book at random and every single page contains sinuous, luminous passages, which also often contain deeper meanings. In the above passage, for example, I glean an ars poetica of sorts, that is, just as one may begin a poem without knowing where the poem will go, "at the call of instinct, it will fly / unaware of the destination of its random journey / until arriving at the site of encounter."

Fine, let's open the book at random a few times -- these passages, these poems but also "magnificent creatures" (as blurber Jonathan Skinner so accurately labels them), speak for themselves and their enticing powers:
Page 33:

down, the tide goes down in the irresistible
warmth of a body that escapes language’s effluvia
so as to rid itself, by looking of its gradual
submission to clumsiness; with absent eyes, with
the same reticent happiness of the young who
throw pleasure onto their arched backs, she who
can’t trace the tenderness of past times on her
breasts is able to smile; when the body alters its
coveted geography, unknown parts are coated
by substances that shall confuse it; an area at
the end of the mind designs these figures, a
gesture as elemental as the knife; as if time had
never passed, the landscape superimposes its
figures over the sordid reading of facts; bluntly,
desire slips back to other gestures; another is
the instance that allows for the void to be filled

And
Page 53

cellular foundations, open your eyes, look at
the species, touch the thickness, amplify sense
of touch at the ends of your body; it is not in
the water where sound dissolves; it is in the
thicket, where serpents are growing

And
Page 67

if there is a path, they are shadows avoided like
ferns growing in the forest; a life that has not
been takes refuge in the dampness of termites;
no one talks anymore of the cleared effluvia,
she mourns, mourns the body, mourns while
licking the wound that won’t close; she opens her
mouth, air circulates, and in that gap is proof that
uninhabited shadows are sometimes necessary in
order to dissipate life; although that body threatens
her at night and settles a bubbling cluster in her
chest, she understands that the moon refused to
cohere with her history; bitterness sank to her
elbows and there she decanted her cowardice;
but this language of worry no longer sentences
her, as if the water had released the pressure; it
is now the instance of exact bodies that enlists

And
Page 73

to reach a point or an agreement, or a pact,
or a recent self-questioning as to where or to
what, for what or for when, if desire or nothing,
and once again desire, and to say yes to what
emanates, and to say no to one’s own absurd
cubicle when understanding becomes more
untenable, or when acceptance terrorizes with
its bottomless transparency; to stretch oneself
like a tree towards anxiety’s major route, an arm
punctuating the air, fingers spread in assured
extension, the body like an arrow tensioned in
all directions, arms and legs elongated in water,
altitude and depth on the surface, floating
in the rhythmic inhalation and exhalation of
desire, of the number, of distance, of the head
submerged between the green and celestial, in
the multitude of bubbles and guttural sounds,
that comes no longer from the throat but from
a vague zone; machine, motor, blade, oar, arm
that stretches, leg that sinks, body that slides

The work certainly seems infused with, inspired by, meditations on science and nature and the unknown but tempting depths of seas and oceans, and philosophy -- while all being quite impressively limned with desire. Its sensibility is perfectly captured by a cover image from artist Emilie Clark whose lovely biomorphic images I've long followed and enjoyed. Enervating it all is an eros also seen in the subtitles and their progression: First, “la orquidea y el moscardon” or “orchid and bumble-bee”. Then (my favorite) "los petalos furiosos" or "the furious petals". Lastly, "malvas orqideas del mar" or "mauve sea-orchids".

It's worth noting the form. Without meaning any insult, the poems at first seemed to me to be prose cut-up in lines. This, I think, reflects how these poems are organic bodies whose lines flow together and flow so well together that I initially they should not be be cut up (hence my envisioning of each poem as a body of prose). But there are line-breaks (though no stanza breaks) so that the structure works effectively in high-lighting the beauty of the language and facilitating their impact. Compare, say, this passage as an unbroken prose piece
like the orchid patiently waiting for the bumble-bee that will pollinate it, an unexpected wind causes the flower of scents to burst open and glands begin to secrete their effluvia so the bumble-bee at celestial distances may perceive, amid the night's fragrances, the intoxicating substance; at the call of instinct it will fly

with how it was actually presented as
like the orchid patiently waiting for the bumble-
bee that will pollinate it, an unexpected wind
causes the flower of scents to burst open and
glands begin to secrete their effluvia so the
bumble-bee at celestial distances may perceive,
amid the night's fragrances, the intoxicating
substance; at the call of instinct it will fly

The latter is more effective in focusing further -- and relishing -- the words. I appreciate this reminder of how forms in poetry are not random but deliberate in the hands of the master artist (which, this book persuades me, is Zemborain.) To read this book is to make love, not just with the universe, but one’s self: “nothing prevents the dog from / smelling shoes, or the sun from hiding itself in / the billboard or heating the face with its shadow; / resistance acquires light, the eyelashes hum, / feet of sand kneel before the uncertainty of the / moment, already air and ocean and undulation / and a sky of pearly insistence; to be in that sky / nothing more than a particle in the detached / decipherment of a vanishing afternoon.”

*****

As remuneration for editing Galatea Resurrects, Eileen Tabios doesn't have her books reviewed here ... but she's pleased to point you elsewhere to Thomas Fink's review of her SILENCES: The Autobiography of Loss.

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