We are greatly indebted to the poetry of Coral Bracho. First and foremost, we are indebted to it for the revelation of a way of naming the world, reality, the various layers of this complex reality, as no one had done before. Her first book, Peces de piel fugaz, already boasted the obsessions, themes, and aquatic rhythms of a writing that can rightly be defined with a quote from that same inaugural book: “Your voice [Coral Bracho’s] was a path of overflowing grass, and time, an unhurried account of future landscapes, of lonely illuminated waters.”
This poetry makes way for the aquatic. The passage of time, nature, and everything takes place through a gaze that advances laterally, in flashes, in glances, in illuminations or intuitions that lead the reader to leave behind her prior conception of the world and open herself to textures, sensations, surfaces, depths, and ideas. And one must surrender, listen, feel differently, make way for other instruments of sensitivity. That is what Coral’s poetry gives us: discoveries, revelations. Like in this poem:
Detrás de la cortina
Detrás de la cortina hay un mundo de calma,
detrás del verde espeso
el remanso,
la profunda quietud.
Es un reino intocado, su silencio.
Desde el espectro líquido
de otro mundo,
desde otra realidad de sonidos dispersos;
desde otro tiempo
enmarañable, me llaman.
[Behind the Curtain
Behind the curtain there’s a world of calm,
behind the thick green
safe haven,
deep stillness.
It is an untouched realm, its silence.
From the liquid spectrum
of another world,
from another reality of scattered sounds;
from another time
fit to be tangled, they call me.]
In this “tangle”, where we perceive not disorder but the slow succession of the landscape the poem develops, the lyrical voice always requests the reader’s tacit participation, the necessary counterpart that completes what is being said. This is a work that appeals to all the senses, that seeks to build bridges across spaces that might seem remote, very different from those we are accustomed to, but that, upon reflection, might well be just around the corner from everyday experience, in the abysses of sleep, in the hinges between one thing and the next, in the spaces that we think are empty but that are inhabited by near-invisible presences. But not invisible to the eyes of this poet, nor to the landscapes she offers us, presented in a tone somehow dampered, syncopated. So it goes in the following poem, which alludes to a mystery never deciphered, but only named, intuited in verse:
Esto que ves aquí no es
Esto que ves aquí no es.
Alguien te oculta una pieza.
Es el fragmento
que da el sentido. Es la palabra
que altera el orden
del furtivo universo. El eje
oculto
sobre el que gira. Este recuerdo
que articulas
no es. Falta el espacio
que ajusta
el caos.
Alguien jala los hilos. Alguien
te incita a actuar. Cambia los escenarios,
los reacomoda. Sustrae objetos.
Cruzas de nuevo
el laberinto a oscuras. El hilo
que en él te dan
no te ayuda a salir.
[What You See Here Is Not
What you see here is not.
Someone is hiding a piece from you.
That fragment
makes it make sense. It is the word
that alters the order
of the furtive universe. The hidden
axis
around which it turns. This memory
you construct
is not. It lacks the space
that fits
chaos.
Someone’s pulling the strings. Someone
stirs you to act. The settings change,
they readjust them. Take objects away.
Again, you walk
the labyrinth in the dark. The thread
they give you in it
does not help you out.]
The poems come forward through mystery, beauty, inquiry into the world and a profound perspective on nature (but also the twists and turns of memory and thought), sometimes leaving us bewildered, as in the previous case, which gives the impression of the perfectly assembled mise-en-scène of a nightmare, somewhere between fiction and reality. Disconcerting images, as if the products of a dream, are opened and unfurled in the verses like a flower of strange petals, falling one by one with a magnetic rhythm from which we cannot escape.
It is not easy to outline a general idea of Coral Bracho’s oeuvre. It has changed over the years, taking on new tones, forms, nuances, and themes. Within it, we can find poems of many lengths, composed of many movements of diverse, fluctuating verbal music, where sound and sense become absolutely unified. What amazes me and what I admire the most about her is her aquatic tone, the way it flows and slips through her readers’ minds and senses, with verses that stack and intertwine, that compliment each other, that recreate each other, regardless of the theme or themes the poems address. There is a pleasure in and for language, an undeniable rhythm, a perpetual risk, a walking-on-the-edge-of-the-abyss, but also an explosion of sensations, not only visual but also tactile and olfactory. As David Huerta writes in the preface to an anthology of her work, “Hers is a poetry for the senses and for the intellect.” To conclude, here are two short poems, each from a different book; a window through which the reader might dare to make her own discoveries of all that which awaits her in this body of work, such that, within it, she might find her own space, her own garden of words.
Como un acuario
La luz de la tarde escoge algunas plantas
y en algunas de sus hojas penetra.
Como un acuario encendido por sus peces;
como un fluir
de la noche
entre rastros de estrellas,
transcurre
en su quietud
la maleza.
[Like a Fish Tank
The evening light chooses some plants
and permeates some of their leaves.
Like a fish tank lit up by its fish;
like night
flowing
between the tracks of stars,
in stillness
pass
the weeds.]
Lluvia de oro sobre el estero
Las semillas del sol nos guían
sobre el oscuro cristal del agua.
Abajo, entre las raíces,
como una llama incipiente
y silenciosa, vibra
la selva.
[Gold Rain on the Estuary
The sun’s seeds guide us
over the dark glass of water.
Underneath, among the roots,
like an emerging, silent
flame, vibrates
the forest.]
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
