Translated by Allen Josephs and Laura Juliet Wood. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2019. 144 pages. $16.95.
The Insistence of Harm, the latest collection by the heralded Spanish poet Fernando Valverde, begins with “The Maid of Scarborough,” which imagines Anne Brontë in her final, deteriorating journey, stricken by tuberculosis:
She leans into the window,
inhaling the final needles of fading sunlight
and the odor of the afternoon reminds her of fish
and, also, the passing of days.
Even on the threshold of death, though, there’s a twist:
Someone sees her pass,
she traverses winter more than a century later,
thin as mist,
wind behind the curtains
or an icy hand tracing on the windowpane
through closed eyes.
How appropriate that Valverde should infuse an historical figure’s dying days with a presence that reverberates across centuries, for Valverde is fixated with the long tail of life’s suffering. The language of outright violence is immediate: it hits, strikes, breaks, takes. The language of “harm,” on the other hand, is more nebulous: it can’t often be contained by a single, discrete act, and suggests impacts that insinuate their way into the present and future. (The same goes for el daño in the original Spanish, from which the book is translated by Allen Josephs and Laura Juliet Wood). At times, Valverde bears the cross of his own regrets. At times, his poems are dedicated to those who have suffered harm; elsewhere, they are portraits of those who instigated harm. In Valverde’s work, harm is like damp air, working its way into everything, implicating everyone.
Not surprisingly, Valverde’s poetry exists on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His poems frequently inhabit literal edges—balconies and bridges, cliffs and ravines—or the figurative borderlands of a troubled psyche prowling abandoned streets, brooding life’s momentous junctures of birth or death, or gazing on seas in a haze of melancholia. In the first and last of the book’s four sections, Valverde’s poems often address, or are addressed to, specific people, from his own life and well beyond. In one, the Bosnian intellectual and poet Izet Sarajlić shades toward death, his moments scribed in painstaking detail:
Izet Sarajlić looks at his watch,
there is no response to the waiting,
then he follows the trolley line,
number fourteen,
and climbs to the Lion Cemetery,
on the street people are returning from market
and run with their bags as the crossroad draws near
more silent and deaf.
As with his Brontë elegy, Valverde subtly tinkers with the senses (that of hearing) and fuses the concrete detail (watch, trolley line, bags filled from market) with the interior journey of the subject. Such contrasts heighten the way public life continues to swirl around private suffering. Some of Valverde’s poems are alone in a crowd; some are alone with their thoughts. In either case, Valverde’s achievement is to capture the cruelest effect of anxiety: how the presence of an exterior, seemingly unbothered world only underlines the lonely landscape of the interior.
For me, the bracing desolation of Valverde’s work emerges best in the book’s two middle sections, “Voyage of the World” and “Sadness in Maps.” The poems here are akin to the earnest snapshots taken by a backpacker-auteur wandering away his regrets after a hard split-up. These moments contain about as much language as could fit on a postcard and are by turns plangent and pulsating. The poet takes us from San Salvador (“Today I know that hope / is fear / blindfolded”) to Syntagma Square, Athens (with its “suicidal dog race / chasing cycles and cars / . . . throbbing exhaust, / desperation / fire and barbed wire . . . ”). And to Bogotá, with this poem dedicated to an “Irene”:
All the streets lead north,
the mountains are there
shrouding Bogotá with their mystery
halting time and the moment
caught in your eyes.There’s winter in your face tonight
and the melancholy promise
of a cloudy image.I can see it in the way you keep
things suspended in your gaze.The fine rain at dawn
is the water in my hands,
the blue mountains are the north,
all maps seek a return.
Consider the “winter in your face” and “fine rain . . . in my hands.” Scientific advances tell us that trauma plays out most profoundly on a neural level, but the varied forces of memory and harm register first in the body in Valverde’s poems. Here a blindfold pulled over the eyes or an “icy hand tracing on the windowpane,” there “calloused feet” or a lost love’s “tortuous gait.” If our wanderer’s ruminations sometimes shade into earnest abstractions, we’re snapped back to attention by such fresh, specific imagery. We can almost feel the poet heft a backpack over his shoulder and lean his cheek against a cold bus window.
The way harm in Valverde’s poems strikes upon the body parallels how the emotional depth of his work emanates from bodies. Much of his poetry seems triggered by presences—an historical figure, a boyhood pal, a lost love—who insist their way into the corners of the poet’s mind wherever he goes. The poems may be lonely, remains left over from a sometimes unnamed antecedent, but they aren’t empty. Here’s “Journey,” in which the heat and certainty of old desire has turned cool and impermanent:
In this night of insomnia
I’m going to write your name on the windowpane
and watch mountains
come apart like memories.What doesn’t return cannot age,
their faces won’t wrinkle on a damp train.There are important things I want to tell you
one
by
one
but the words slip.
I write Yet
and see snow falling on the face
of one who knows he’s alone.You can’t travel on a memory.
Though Valverde’s poems are stark, they possess the aliveness of someone who has lost love but, at least, has known it well. As with a doused, flattened fire, there’s the memory of the heat and light, and plenty of embers still gleaming underneath. And of course, in this collection obsessed with harm, the capacity to be singed.
For all the internal emotional terrain Valverde’s writing covers, the poet has a definite eye to the outer world. Appropriately for this erstwhile journalist (a decade at Spain’s El País), Valverde’s dispatches are as much notebooks filled with a reporter’s details as they are a backpacker’s postcards home. He offers a lament for the young Nicaraguan poet, Francisco Ruiz Udiel, who died by suicide in 2010. One long poem imagines the convicted Serbian war criminal Ratko Mladić, who, confronting death’s guises, “intuits every precipice” as “opportunity / crossing bridges / with its eyes nailed to the ground”—only to discover that death dominates him, not the other way around. In “Earthquake,” the poet treads the wreckage of tremors and seems to sum up how harm insists, and persists, its way through everything:
We will not be safe until we are dead.
Maybe pain pursues us after all
like mud stuck to our shoes.