The Red Song

Uruguayan poet Machado (Rituales) receives her first full treatment in English in a collection that is so imagistic and spare as to be almost pointillist in nature: “the delicate skin of eyelids/ canvas/ closet/ the word purity/ yellow benches/ clarity/ forgetting.” These poems accumulate a type of incantatory power upon rereading. Paul Celan haunts the book, particularly in its epigraphs and yoking of highly personal, embodied affect and crisis writ large: “Red vowels leave me as I squeeze this city between/ my thighs.” The dual language presentation gives readers access to translator Michelson’s decision to adhere as closely as possible to Machado’s at times perplexing word choices. Organized as a diptych (“The Black Song” and “The Red Song”), the poems form a taut narrative set against a syncretic landscape: Mayan and medieval European imagery, “Water from Jamaica, from Jaramillo.” Near the book’s end, a number of foreigners appear (“The one with white hair,/ with black hair.// And the other, blond and distant.// And me, the foreigner./ And her, the foreigner”), as if to reassure the reader that the poet, too, has become “strangely possessed” by the surreal enterprise of communing between worlds. Deriving power from the collaging of sound rather than sense, Machado has produced a hallucinatory work. (May)