No Shelter
/ poems of Pura López Colomé
In forms that blur back and forth between poetry and prose, López-Colomé uses spare and honest language to describe the music of dreams, faith, and faithlessness; hers are poems of the soul resuscitated from the shackles of the body. As Gander notes in his Introduction: "[This] poetry is philosophical and exacting, pared into short, sharp lines, obsidian flakes." Indeed, the fierce intelligence and insistent moral and spiritual engagement of López-Colomé's poetry situate her among the most significant contemporary Mexican poets. No Shelter is a bilingual edition, with English translations appearing in the first half of the text and the Spanish originals in the second.
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“Gander’s translation is a pleasure to read. He provides us with a live version of López-Colomé poetry in English and continues his work of invigorating the English language itself….his English versions are living, breathing texts in dialogue with the original….Gander’s choice of sounds and words all serve to create aa poetic movement equivalent to that of the original Spanish.”
“In forms that blur poetry and prose, López-Colomé uses a spare language to explore the music of dream, faith and faithlessness, history and memory.”
“López-Colomé’s poems make obvious use of her influences, exploring meaning through Beckett- and Stein-like repetition, compressing these reveries into adamantine lines reminiscent of H. D. and Gluck or spinning out into prose passages suggestive of early Hass. Yet López-Colomé’s erudition does not overwhelm her poems, and her own voice is far too singular to be subsumed by her forebears or contemporaries. Her poems dart in and out of obvious meaning, teasing sense out of obscurity, philosophical inquiry out of incantatory repetition and variation. In No Shelter: the Selected Poems of Pura López-Colomé, Forrest Gander (himself a difficult and rewarding poet) selects poems from López-Colomé’s three middle books and weaves them together to create a sense of her obsessions, if not the progress of her artistic evolution.”
“Pura López-Colomé is fascinated by the melodiousness of rhetoric exemplified by her translations of Paul Celan. There is an atheistic religiosity in her oeuvre, a lack of sincerity that is effective. (To her translator, she said: ‘Sincerity and veracity are distinct.’) She seems to be stationed in a single place while the labyrinthine universe rotates around her. Her poetry is an alchemy through which she lets herself travel, as if in a dream, through the layers of stimulation that envelope her, such as in her work ‘Death of the Kiss.’”
“Poet Forrest Gander has shown courage in translating an unknown and complex poet like Mexican Pura López-Colomé. Her work in the original Spanish is surreal, dense, and gothic. Gander has transformed a challenging Spanish into poems that breathe in English and resonate with the best avant-garde traditions of American poetry, while they show new approaches to daring poetic forms.”
“No Shelter is made up of only eight poems, all arresting in their tortured explorations…. The elegance of López-Colomé is equaled by thhe intensity of her images. She is masterly in her insight that what makes memory is the appearance of the intangible…. Gander ought to bee congratulated for making this fine poet available-in crisp, euphoniious versions-to an English-language audience, for hers is a unique vvoice. She defies the stereotype of Mexican poetry as self-indulgently concerned solely with the nation’s past. Instead, she establishes her oeuvre in an ontological tradition associated with Celan, a tradition difficult to crack open, but, once its meanings are on full display, dazzling in its rewards.”
“Though the subtitle declares No Shelter to be “The Selected Poems of Pura Lopez- Colome,” the selection, from three of the five books López-Colomé has published to date, is executed so intelligently, so smoothly, so musically, that the collection forms, in and of itself, the trajectory of a book.”