Translation: Nancy Angeli
Preface: Anna Crowe
**
Find the book here
In her poem, ‘La lluna i la primavera’ (The moon and spring), Teresa Colom ends with the observation,
and when the birds the spring or pleasures
manage to distract me
poets’ muse though they may be–
I choose not to write
It seems to me that this is precisely what makes Teresa Colom such a fine poet. It is the way she immerses herself in the natural world, observing its creatures (including human creatures), the way life changes, the way she records all of this with great exactitude, that makes her poetry so vivid, acutely experienced and memorable. Life, she tells us, is mysterious and, like the chicken in the pot in this poem, we don’t know what our part in it may be; we don’t know the recipe. While staying close to her subject and observing the smallest details, she also hints at the ambiguity of life. There is almost always a sub-text lurking, and often her poems remain mysterious, leaving us with questions; in the above poem, for example, we wonder what the enigmatic ‘box’ might be that she makes out of ‘the ground the sky the days to come’.
Her poem, The Cage’, which charts the life and death of the family canary, is subtly coloured by the many insecurities of the family dynamic, and by the end of the poem we can see that the canary’s cage is so much more than just that. The break-up of her parents’ marriage is given one oblique line:
We, her sons and daughters, went from being children
to leaving home behind us.
Our father had already done the same.
The canary stayed in the flat with her.
Exploring memories of childhood, Teresa Colom makes skilful use of the images of pet animals in poems like this one, and in ‘Crayfish’ and ‘The Chick’, to explore how family relationships, especially the mother/ daughter relationship, evolve; these poems give her an opportunity for dealing too with the concept of death. Learning, for example, while at the baker’s that her pet chick, grown into a cock and given away, had been allowed to be pecked to death by turkeys, the poet offers no comment, but there is simply a vivid sense-impression recorded by memory: ‘Serafí’s bakery had a delicious smell/of bread.’ This recalls the opening lines of ‘The Moon and Spring’: ‘we don’t write about death only about life/the dead do not write’, and the poet seems to be suggesting we should look to our five senses, and that the riches they provide may outdo death and give consolation. On the other hand, the sense of smell is, as we know, closely linked to memory, and it may simply be that she is asserting the power of the senses to help us remember events and emotions. As ever, this poet leaves enough space for the reader to come to her own conclusions.
Several of the poems I had the pleasure of translating are from her collection, My mother was wondering about death (Pagès, 2012), and her poem ‘Roses’ is a moving vignette of a Pakistani rose-seller trying to sell his ‘dejected roses’ in restaurants and bars, ‘beggar roses that bow to any wish’. In the last lines of the poem, the unsuccessful rose-vendor, with his ‘foreign skin’ sits on the pavement listening out for anyone ‘who might buy his last few roses/before they die without having felt they were flowers.’ In the limp and bowed stalks of the roses the poet subtly suggests the vendor’s body-language, and the poet lets us see, without saying it explicitly, that the rose-seller too is waiting and hoping that he won’t die before he has felt he is accepted as another human being.
‘Instalments’, from this same collection, gives us an awareness of how complicated love can be, and the poets portrays her mother’s reverence for book-learning (in the shape of the set of encyclopaedias she buys from a door-to-door salesman) with affection and gentle humour. Here is how the poem ends, the last line striking for its fierce tenderness:
A home decorated with objects of little value.
When my brothers and sisters are all here, she jokes:
«When I’m not here you’ll throw it all away!»
We laugh and tell her we shall.
She bought the encyclopaedias in instalments.
I keep them here in this line of the poem.
We can see how the way these lines are end-stopped contributes to the sense of emotion being held on a tight leash.
In many poems the poet dispenses with punctuation and upper-case letters altogether, and the effect is one of fluidity, of barriers coming down and all times and places coming together and merging, as in her poem, ‘Stitches’, dedicated to her mother. In the list of chores her mother performs there are just two described in any detail, the hemming on a pair of trousers, and the list of ingredients in the home-made tomato purée, but ‘behind so many simple things/there is the time you spent’, and in these, the poet tells us, she will one day ‘read’ her mother, as though suggesting that her mother is a difficult book to be read, to be studied, and understood. The language Teresa Colom uses is clear, everyday speech, and she gives her attention to familiar and seemingly uncomplicated domestic lives, but what emerges is poetry of fine and complex ideas, of emotion subtly evoked and ready to knock us sideways with the force of its restraint. This is exemplified in ‘A body was missing’, where the finality of loss is brought home to us, and the voice of the poem refuses to acknowledge its absurdity. Only at the end is there a sense of consolation, though again the last line retains the mystery of death and how we never quite understand it:
…in the darkness the gaze might travel outwards
and outside there might be earth and stars.
A body was missing but in order to hold I know not what.
Anna Crowe