Watchword / Review
By John Taylor in The Antioch Review
from a roundtable review (for whole thing, click here):
. . . . The juxtaposition reminds me of the vision informing Watchword, a volume by Pura López Colomé (b. 1952) that has recently appeared in translation. (One of her poems is also featured in the anthology.) "Like one of the dead / who bury their own dead," she writes in the deep-probing "Dialogue of the Ashes," "I dissolve / in a Platonic interchange / between what I left behind / and what is reduced to crumbs, / a modest, vital withholding, / a crevasse that gets murkier / the deeper you look into it." Watchword is a thought- and emotion-provoking book in that the subtext of several poems is a personal struggle with cancer whereas the texts themselves garner widely and maintain a kind of height that transcends the individual human condition. López Colomé can be graphic ("the same tears / of rapture, / grief, / anxiety, / of being wrung out completely"), but even here the context is not, strictly speaking, her specific self and there is often a movement toward generalization, away from mere confession or complaint. Poems tend to blossom out beyond the body, as it were. Note how different elements, some objective and others personal, compose "Echo," a poem dedicated to Emily Dickinson:
Behind the wall
of hydrogen and oxygen,
very clear, almost illuminated,
you allow me to think
that the Root of the Wind is Water
and the atmosphere
smells of salt and microbes and intimacy.
And in that instant comes
the low echo
of a beyond beyond . . .