Poems

Coral Bracho was born in Mexico City in 1951. She has published six books of poems: Peces de piel fugaz [Fish of Fleeting Skin] (1977), El ser que va a morir [The Being that is Going to Die] (1981), Tierra de entraña ardiente [Earth of Burning Entrails] (in collaboration with the painter Irma Palacios, 1992), La voluntad del ámbar [The Will of Amber] (1998), Ese espacio, ese jardín [That Space, That Garden] (2003), and Cuarto de hotel (2007). Her poems were translated for the PTC's 2005 World Poets' Tour by Tom Boll and the poet Katherine Pierpoint.A selection from her first two collections was included in the definitive anthology of contemporary neo-baroque writing from Latin America, Medusario (1996), edited by Roberto Echavarren, José Koser and Jacobo Sefamí. Like many of the writers who operate in this line that runs from Luis de Góngora through José Lezama Lima, Bracho's early poems marry verbal luxuriance with a keen intelligence and awareness of artistic process. Yet that artistic consciousness doesn't lose sight of world. When she visited London in 2005 she described the way that her tour-de-force‘Agua de bordes lúbricos' [Water of Jellyfish] operates: ‘It tries to get close to the movement of water' with images that are ‘fleeting'; ‘you can't grasp them, they are very fluid. What remains is that continuity of water.'The poems of La voluntad del ámbar introduce more autobiographical content. Both ‘Trazo del tiempo' [Marks of Time] and ‘Detrás de la cortina' [Behind the Curtain] recount direct memories of childhood. They also tend to rein in the long lines of the earlier collections, replacing fluid syntax with what Julio Trujillo has described as a versification that ‘no es, al cabo, una cuestión meramente rítmica sino casi silogística: el movimiento es conceptual, se pasa de una deducción a otra' [isn't, in the end, merely rhythmical but syllogistic; the movement is conceptual, it passes from one deduction to another]. That conceptual clarity is exercised further in Ese espacio, ese jardín, an extended meditation on the passage of time and the death at the heart of all life, which was awarded the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in 2004.Coral Bracho is also a translator of poetry and has been a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores since 1994.Tom Boll completed his PhD on Octavio Paz and T. S. Eliot in 2005. He has taught in the departments of English and Spanish and Latin American Studies at University College London. His translations have been published by Mango Press and Poetry Review. He was the Assistant Director of the Poetry Translation Centre from 2004 to 2007. Katherine Pierpoint was born in Northampton in 1961. Her first collection of poetry Truffle Beds (Faber, 1995) won a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Kent at Canterbury and in 2006 was poet-in-residence at the King's School Canterbury.Katherine's poems have appeared in Spanish in the anthology La generación del cordero: antología de la poesía actual en las islas británicas edited by Pedro Serrano and Carlos López Beltrán (Trilce Ediciones Mexico 2000). She met Coral Bracho in Mexico when the anthology was published and they are admirers of each other's work. Katherine's poems combine agile perception with a delicacy of suggestion and an unconventional music; they share a natural affinity with the poems of Coral Bracho and we were excited by the prospect of these two poets meeting through translation, the results of which you can read here.

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