I read through Lucía Estrada’s debut poetry collection Fuegos nocturnos in one sitting. The following week, on a day of the characteristic fine grey rain that comes in over Bogotá from the mountains, I returned to the Biblioteca Virgilio Barco and picked up her more recent anthology: El círculo de la memoria (Lima, 2008).
Even a cursory glance at Estrada’s poetry reveals the main thematic preoccupations that characterize her work: the night, women, fire, magic, and the written word. Certainly, these themes echo through the many voices of El círculo de la memoria. The collection is divided into six parts, chronologically recompiling her previously published work from 1995-2008. Her experimentation with the concept of a circle, first explored in “El Círculo del Poema” in my previous post, continues in this volume.
The two poems below are from the third section of the book, titled “Grimorio.” This section begins with an epigraph from Robert Graves: “The New Moon is the white goddess of birth and growth;/The Full Moon, the goddess of love and battle;/The Old Moon, the black goddess of death and divination” (from The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, first published in 1948). That “Grimorio” calls upon Graves’ classic of poetic myth-making is indicative of the esoteric or even occult elements that give heat to Estrada’s sequence of poems, in turn suggesting resistance against or denial of stark rationality and utilitarianism.
El vuelo de las grullas (from El círculo de la memoria, 2008)
El vuelo de las grullas
atraviesa un cielo de ceniza
adivina al primero en levantarse
líneas negras
hienden el aire negro
alfabeto cerrado
sus árboles muertos
reaparecen
raíces levantan catedrales
cantos de una sola piedra
que mis manos traducen
He nacido
para no perder
un movimiento en su escritura
sus sacerdotes son niebla irrepetible
abren la llama
huellan
desaparecen.
The Flight of Cranes (trans. E. Paskevics, 2015)
The flight of cranes
cuts across an ashen sky
it predicts the first to rise
black lines
cleave into black air
an obscured alphabet
its dead trees
reappear
roots raising cathedrals
songs of a single stone
that my hands translate
I was born
not to miss
a movement in its writing
its priests are a rare
and incomparable fog
they open the flame
they tread on
they disappear.
Thematics of the night, death and disappearance, and the sacred repeat through the poems in this book, suggesting the deeper presence, or resonance, of history. As a result, for these and other poems throughout her obra, the direction or final destination of her poems can be hard to glimpse – shifting, not rooted – making the poems seem infinitely present, circular, each one like a moment in time that is simultaneously deepened with the scent of primitive myth.
Es costumbre (from El círculo de la memoria, 2008)
voy a verla bajo el puente de Java
Su cuerpo
ya es como el cristal
y su rostro amargo
como el color
de las ortigas
Largas horas de buscarla
– de buscarme en ella –
me han hecho paciente
Hay un reflejo de flores abatidas
en el agua que la cubre
Soy su memoria más cercana
por eso no la abandonado
La ahogada es el filo
de mi propia muerte
It is Customary (trans. E. Paskevics, 2015)
I’ll see it below the Java bridge:
Her body
already it is like glass
and her embittered features
like the colour
of nettles
Long hours of searching
– searching for myself in her –
has made me patient
There is a reflection of dejected flowers
in the water that covers her
I am her closest memory
therefore she won’t be abandoned
The drowned woman is the brink
of my own death
This near-contradiction is perhaps best conveyed with the final lines from the collection as a whole, closing off the “circle of memory” that this volume investigates:
... Cuando la noche se inclina y parece que pronuncia tu nombre,
hundes tus manos en la oscuridad
y buscas a tientas el cuerpo inabarcable de tu memoria.
"When night reaches down and seems to speak your name,
sink your hands into the darkness
and fumble with the boundless body of your memory. "
Thus Estrada has opened the scale, from the circular trajectory of a single poem into the wider and perhaps infinite circle that shapes both individual and collective memory.
Lucía Estrada blogs occasionally at http://luciaestradaz.blogspot.com.
Emily Paskevics is the author of The Night Was Animal, or: Methods in the Art of Rogue Taxidermy (Dancing Girl Press). Her work can also be seen in Hart House Review, Vallum Magazine, Acta Victoriana, San Pedro River Review, Branch Magazine, and UofT Magazine. Emily was born and raised in a semi-suburban ravine in Toronto, Canada.