In the book, there is an unfurling—in differing spaces that render them visible or perceptible—of sensations related to pleasure and desire.
Coral Bracho in conversation with Jesús Ramón Ibarra
A multiplicity of journeys rests on water: the summits and bifurcations of language, unfolding, the impact of tectonic plates; the sexual ascent of mountains, vitreous fire, water on colossal scales or water in narrow streams that circle the earth until forming grand entireties infused with multiplying jellyfish, blastocytes, sensations, utopian and dystopian skins, stocks of wood, the sea that grows or shrinks as it forges its everlasting sheen. The voyage there, the voyage back. One such uncommon, at times amorphous journey is that of reading the poetry of Coral Bracho (Mexico, 1951), and recalling that glowing afternoon at Panama’s now-defunct Argosy bookstore when I came across an anthology that has been, for me, defining: Ramón Cote’s Diez de ultramar: Joven poesía latinoamericana, which brings together poets from varied parts of the continent: José Luis Rivas (Mexico, 1950), Alberto Blanco (Mexico, 1951), Raúl Zurita (Chile, 1951), Coral Bracho (Mexico, 1951), Eduardo Milán (Uruguay, 1952), William Ospina (Colombia, 1954), María Auxiliadora Álvarez (Venezuela, 1954), Fabio Morábito (Mexico, 1955), Yolanda Pantin (Venezuela, 1955), and Eduardo Chirinos (Peru, 1960).
The anthology, published by Visor in 1992, drew me closer to outstanding poetics, which have been recognized over time with publications, new editions, homages, critical studies, and literary honors (including the “Federico García Lorca” City of Granada International Poetry Prize and the Queen Sofía Ibero-American Poetry Prize, among others). Such is the case of Coral Bracho, who recently received the FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages (Mexico, 2023). Ramón Cote of Colombia, the anthologist, did a fine job of selecting the authors, whose bodies of work have only grown more solid since. He tells us of Coral Bracho: “This manner of playing down importance without being elusive, of taking detours, governs the work of Coral Bracho, who throws language into disorder, volatizing the meanings of words or, rather, empowering other meanings that do not belong to the realm of the definable.”
It is true: Coral Bracho disrupts, expands, and minimizes language as if it were a filigree carving. She makes the pieces fit and imbues the whole with power. The result is an atmosphere that does not fit in with a single or limited interpretation; her words unleash a polymorphous and polyphonic semantics.
Ramón Cote continues:
There is, in her manner of speaking, a chaotic force that somehow seeks to encompass a totality that allows her to remedy objects’ isolation. For this purpose, Coral Bracho need not set off from some specific point, nor does she need certainty to reach another: the poem is open to adventure. Her poetry has set about transforming breath into a power that supplants the word; its interest lies not in defining a happening but in keeping a sensation in suspense, in exhausting all a thought’s possibilities.
To read Coral Bracho is to come across a series of interpretative possibilities. The words’ journey is unusual; it opens, it closes like a fist, it takes place like a flowering or a sylvanian presence; it happens like water; her poetry keeps in step like water.
Coral Bracho’s aesthetics also fit into a certain poetic current; we find it in Medusario, the legendary anthology compiled by Roberto Echavarren, José Kozer, and Jacobo Sefamí, which starts with José Lezama Lima and the American Neobaroque, to be nourished also by the postulates of Severo Sarduy and Néstor Perlongher, to whom the project is dedicated.
The Medusario anthology is iconic in the Latin American literary sphere, juxtaposing authors of varied nationalities with suggestive poetics marked by polysemy arising from their language. Its makers have the following to say of Coral Bracho:
Coral Bracho’s poetry is articulated through rhyzomes, subterranean filaments that fork in various directions and, with no progressive order, accumulate with neither shape nor root. Bracho’s poems are composed of images that do not form a whole; they do not come to conclusions (they might end in a coma or a semicolon, or simply lack punctuation), they configure no complete idea. Hers is an “aquatic” poetry, in the most precise sense of the word; her verses seek an idea in common with rivers, streams, waterfalls, seas; as they do so, they devise maps, routes, flatlands. Water erases, rewrites, and erases again: an eternal palimpsest wiped clean by time.
This sensorial perception is transliterated to her texts, which are unleashed and apparently unmatched, only to then be fused again into harmony, whether consummated or not. The element of water is unifying. Coral Bracho writes a poetry of shoals, of waves, of high seas and low tides, of whirlpools. Her language is articulated to display, describe, and exploit emotions. It has an overflowing, suggestive sensuality, nourished by forms and mutations, that reveals an effective textual richness. Coral Bracho draws on the sensorial and the extrasensorial.
In 1981, Mexico’s iconic Aguascalientes Poetry Prize was awarded to Coral Bracho for her book El ser que va a morir. The being that is going to die? Is that a sentence, or an allegory? I have spoken with Coral Bracho a few times when we have coincided in her native Mexico at poetry festivals. Over this book in particular, and the simplicity that marks it, there hangs a sense of wonder at what this set of poems has achieved and represented in her oeuvre. We once spoke in an old churchyard busy with live orange trees, heavy with golden, juicy, Lezamian spheres. El ser que va a morir earned this honor from three men who recognized the splendor of a woman’s voice, unfurling a sexual ritual of water. It opens with “En la humedad, la cifrada”:
I hear your body with the watered, tranquil greed
of one immersed (of one
emerging,
one who stretches saturated,
overrun
with sperm) within the coded
wetness (soft oracle, dense; temple)
The senses sharpen immediately. Sensations pluralize the intimacy of the body and its speakers. She draws on the sacred, on the pagan, on the deeply-rooted and the iconic, and she continues:
…I smell
in your deep valleys, eager, embers,
in your unctuous jungles,
gradients. I hear (your tactile semen) the springs, forges,
(fertile apse) I touch
upon your living bogs, your forests: traces
on their enveloping plot: signs
(I open
your anointed thighs, oozing; doused in light)
Coral Bracho turns to sensorial metaphors to make visible the invisible.
Coral Bracho turns to sensorial metaphors to make visible the invisible. She devises a manner of speaking and of naming from the fleeting. The sacred, the divine, and the pagan come together again in the poem “Distant Cities”:
Their incandescent reliefs, their passages, they are
a mournful, single-chorded psalm;
…
In their mirrors of golden gloaming, waters unfold and ignite
pockets of aroma and ritual caresses; in their baths:
laughter, the greening walls;
−Their temples sip from the ocean.
(tr. Forrest Gander)
She makes recurrent use of sacred spaces to situate the reader within the collection’s varied romantic contexts: (temple) and (mosque). Think of the poem “In this Dark Tepid Mosque”:
I know of your body: the reefs,
the scattering birds,
the light sought and unsettled (on your candescent thighs incited by rain),
of your surge:
I know your thresholds as though they let me go to the edge of this roomy, murmurous,
tepid mosque; as though they wove me (your dark suave scent) into the heat of its naves
.…
The mosque excends from the desert to the sea.
On the patios:
The cadenced splendor (sour rumors) of the orange trees;
the languor of the mosses, the myrtles.
(tr. Forrest Gander)
She has a concrete consciousness of the body, based on sensual perception and the literary. A threshold onto pleasure. And, again, allusions to bodies of water in the poem “El ámbito del placer”:
−Now they mark, the door of glass;
from it they plot their pond: Water
with which to besiege certainty; water to verge on it.
…
Outlines the threshold, rhombus, by the pond. Reappears,
entering that stone, setting light to the bushes.
There are forests, vines, gardens, a leafiness, an exuberance and the abundance of the earth as great songs, as fabulations. Hamlet Ayala says on this subject:
On the other hand, we also observe another kind of cycle: an approach to the phenomena and experiences of the human body on a biological level—as well as the potent stamp of a feminine eros, especially present in her first books—finds in the life forms and spaces of the natural world its elements of expression; moving forward, this same potency will continue making itself known from the germination of the earth and its fruits, wildlife and its mysteries, now as a range of visions; contemplation and transit.
Coral Bracho is possessed of a contemplative poetic essence. She has found a vein in her language and has made of this vein a resource of thought, of enunciation, and of musicality. She bolts from rupture towards other possibilities. While every being that is born will indeed die (like the result of an equation), before this takes place, the song comes together; the longings and foundations of this reality are described, but not before insisting, from realism and surrealism, on the touch of skin, of woodland groves, of matter. In this poetry, the speaker not only moves; the speaker also interacts with other interlocutors who take apart the emptiness. This is an erotic water in which there circle the scientific, the placenta, the spiritual, that which is preserved in body and soul. In this book, sexuality is life. In a state of apparent calm, everything overflows and ramifies. There is one poem that has become an avatar within Coral Bracho’s work: “Water’s Lubricious Edges,” where water is named and described in many ways:
Water of jellyfish,
lacteal, sinuous water,
water of lubricious borders; glassy thickness—Deliquescence
in delectable contours. Water—sumptuous water
of involution, of languor
in placid densities. Water,
water silken and plumbeous in opacity, in weight—Mercurial;
water in suspense, slow water. The algal bloom
brilliant—In the paps of pleasure. The algae, the
bracing vapour of its peak…
(tr. Forrest Gander)
In this poem, water shimmers and forks; it speaks to us with its planetary breath, with its transmutation of streams, creeks, gullies, lakes. There is a multiplication of tones, silences, and images: an artistic and creative capacity that, all at once, leads us into a state of observation and meditation. The poem possesses an implicit sublimity in the pleasures and awakenings of sensations:
…
—across the arched silence, across isthmuses
of basalt; the algae, its habitual rub,
its slippage. Light water, fish water; the aura, the agate,
its luminous border-breakings; Fire trailing the fleeing
elk—around the ceiba tree, around the shoal of fish; flame
pulsing;
lynx water, sargo water (The sudden jasper). Luminescence
of jellyfish.
—Edge open, lipped; aura of lubricious borders,
its smoothness rocking, its nesting efflorescence; amphibious,
labile—Water, water silken
with voltaic charge; expectant. Water in suspense, slow water—The
lascivious luminescence
in its oily crossing,
over faulted basalt.
(tr. Forrest Gander)
Coral Bracho delves into and suggests the sense of water’s belonging, of vitality. El ser que va a morir takes its place in the dynasty of consecrated, imperishable books, rife with beauty. Written with vitality and a stylistic uniqueness that the author has displayed since her earliest works, it reaches a sensorial summit with the matter of love. It allows us to glimpse, from this vital element, multiple facets with which to name, to speak; to turn ourselves, as readers, into navigators or swimmer in her aquatic (and telluric) fluorescence, with all its ambiguity of voices:
Your voice (in your body rivers stir
a tranquil foliage; grave and cadenced waters).
−From this door, the pleasures, their thresholds;
from this ring, they’re transfigured−
(tr. Forrest Gander)
And thus has Coral Bracho’s work continued, ever reborn, reverberating, fast-paced, silent, rhythmic, with its corporeal syntax making way for geological layers. She is a poet of the angular mystery of water:
—Otter water, fish water. Water
of jellyfish,
lacteal, sinuous water; Water,
(tr. Forrest Gander)
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
