I can only begin this reading with a personal note. Fondness, and my conviction that reading poetry is now more important than ever, mean I have no choice. My husband, David Huerta, who passed away on October 3, 2022, felt a great deal of brotherly love for Coral, along with the purest of admiration. He was the one who placed in my hands El ser que va a morir. When I entered into this poetry I was, at once, humbled and moved. Later, I met her in person. It made me happy to corroborate that this magician, this sibyl, is a woman of surprising warmth and youthfulness, of a modesty and simplicity that stand in contrast to the complexity of her perspective. At the core of this fragile woman lies a seed of vital strength that is translated into her poetry and that nourishes her reader’s spirit.
I was as fascinated by her personality as I was by her poetry. To the two of them, David and Coral, I owe these two lessons: that the most intimate closeness to tradition need not conflict with originality, and that concern for the collective need not be distant from the search for an artistically consummated voice. This is knowledge I will carry in my soul until my dying day.
Coral Bracho was thirty years old when she published El ser que va a morir, a title that deserves to be read as a declaration of her principles as a poet whose main concern is the brevity of our lives in the passage of time. In this volume of poems, Bracho consolidates the achievements with which she inaugurated her writing career in Peces de piel fugaz (1977) and puts her strikingly original verbal instruments on display. While, from her first book on, we find broad-ranging and opulent vocabulary, as well as a system of comparisons linked together to create atmospheres that show us successively subjective or external landscapes (“And it was as if both of us held a segment of that same silence, that small gesture of night like a mirror on the back of doors […]”, tr. Maeve Carver), these are joined in El ser que va a morir by romantic discourse, moving in its willingness to fall silent when words run out:
Because I don’t know what to do with all your gestures,
all these looks of yours in my words,
I write
so that they burn,
so they will excise,
will root out
this doelike anxiety in your eyes,
that aquatic rattle between your lips,
and return you to the lathe of silence
in this deserted afternoon
(tr. Maeve Carver)
Here, Bracho’s elastic syntax becomes a strategy with which to broaden meaning to the point of rendering it a kaleidoscope.
This book has two intended recipients: the beloved, whom Bracho addresses with a language of extraordinary erotic potency from which the confessional “I” is absent:
I study you unashamed, with pleasure, to sketch impassible that
crisp line
on the coppery, fundamental border […]
and the world, observed with painstaking attention:
It is a zenith of poppies, and the instantaneous appearance in summer
of the bird hunter under the stone archway.
They are entering the palace.
They are opening its doors.
There is one key moment at which Bracho reveals what the warp of the fabric she is weaving is made of: the moment when the beloved and the world are commingled and intertwined. Whom is the voice that utters these verses addressing?
I know of your body: the reefs,
the scattering birds,
the light sought and unsettled […]
(tr. Forrest Gander)
and then the parentheses open:
(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 […]
(tr. Forrest Gander)
In these verbs we not only glimpse traces of the body and the landscape, of architecture and anatomy; the word itself is split in two. In the Spanish version of the poem above, is “sé” a use of the verb “ser” in the imperative? Or the present-tense conjugation of “saber”? These two possibilities are not mutually exclusive; rather, each enriches the other.
This is poetry that delves again and again into the landscape and the mental world, into the tracks left behind on the spirit by perception. It will later open up to accommodate a critical perspective that will be expressed with the same serene tone, but with less profuse language. It is not poetry that will keep only to the elegaic register. Little by little, although it includes ethical doubts from the start, it will consolidate a stance on violence and an open view of loss and pain.
In La voluntad del ámbar (1998), Bracho returns to her favored subjects, but she truly excels in poems like “The Murmurs,” “¿Le puedo hacer una pregunta?” and, above all, “The Indigenous Voice,” where she incoporates a distress I can only call civic, formulated with a more even language that she will go on to use fluently at her moments of greatest spiritual tension.
It’s the dolor
of the voice that is stopped. Of that timeless
and profound voice
that just like that is stopped. That just like that
dies to us.
(tr. Forrest Gander)
Thus her gamut of themes unfurls while, at once, the potent “I” that addressed the beloved (with a sibylline language and robut exuberance) transitions into a first-person plural, even in her most intimate books like Ese espacio, ese jardín, dedicated to her father’s memory. In it, life is experimented as an ensemble with room even for death, “the gold thread we get tangled between pieces of furniture” (tr. Forrest Gander).
Those, the dead, they watch us with their deepened eyes,
and their inflamed hearts, and a bewilderment of children,
a desolate jolt startles us,
a private sadness.
(tr. Forrest Gander)
And, once again, death:
Death sings gently
at the courtyard’s threshold, in the silence of the lemon trees.
She sings with a mother’s fervor
to the one who listens. To the one who sees her hang,
with tenderness,
her scaffolding of sun,
her bonds, clear and
mysterious.
This long poem on memory and images of childhood, whose gaze turns to the world from the height of a little girl who crawls and later runs through the fields or beside the sea, is a book in which the images that summon up the verses turn and spin over one other, for, “−One day, at night, / we must return.”
This radical acceptance hangs over the book Cuarto de hotel, in which Bracho describes a hospital stay as a delusion in which the lodgings from which she views the world, from which one might glimpse the sea or a night full of signs, become a prison. Something happened that has peeled bare the walls, that has transformed this stay into a traipse through faded, stained rooms of degraded forms. But there are no complaints. It only hurts a little. This book also marks the appearance of the first mental turbulence of the poet’s mother, Ana Teresa Carpizo, who will later play a leading role in her book Debe ser un malentendido. Carpizo says, in the initial obfuscation of illness: “Without my consent, someone / keeps me here.”
But, in the end, life bursts through triumphant as a sonic and visual thunderbolt, a crowing rooster who “loosed his sun in the middle of the room.”
After these two collections in which Bracho delves into the experience of illness and loss, her poetry will take another turn to face the unease that lies in wait for us. Not the existential unease that is the inheritance of all humanity and that guided her philosophical concerns in her first books, but the specifically Mexican fear of the violence, lies, and cruelty that hem us in.
This takes place in her book Sí ríe el emperador (2010), and Bracho’s political concerns are expressed explicitly in the poems “Manifestantes queman un autobús en Oaxaca,” “Títere y sombra,” “En la entretela,” and “El instante en el que todo cambia”:
The moment when the trained dog
attacks
the fragile, startled woman
with the child in her arms
Is the moment everything changes.
Through the dog’s
bloodshot eyes
the world watches.
This is the same mindset that observes the world with painstaking attention, but the world looks back, in Desde los ojos inyectados del perro, with threatening eyes that have lingered too long over this country’s victims of violence. Despite her economy of language, we see the dark-skinned, slender face, the big, frightened eyes, perhaps a shawl, the diminutive arm of a child, the braid.
Thus Bracho’s poetry has broadened, widening its course, rekindling its powers. Ever closer, it continues to cast over the enchanted reader the spell of its language and of the exceptional intelligence that gives it life. In Marfa, Texas, a book in which the poet once again views the landscape, natural life, and architecture, suddenly, with the concision of a haiku and a distilled power of evocation, Bracho shows us this botanical picture card: “Like a riven heart / the prickly pear bleeds out onto the rib that holds it up.”
In this simple image, the prickly pear has the sacrificial air of a small, sacred offering. Some pages later, Bracho describes the bird that devours it with a “[…] piercing eye that shines / like obsidian.”
I shall conclude these reflections with a note on Debe ser un malentendido (2018), translated by Forrest Gander as It Must Be a Misunderstanding, an account of the memory loss experienced by her mother, Ana Teresa Carpizo. Bracho picks up the pieces of a memory that is coming apart, starting from Ese espacio…, in which silence and confusion fit into a moving collection of incomplete images. If, as in Dickinson’s case, punctuation has allowed Bracho to highlight the importance of silence and pauses, it is in this book where the lesson of the mysteries of emptiness allows her to present a diorama of the complete experience of language, even including its absence: the silence in which words appear (when there are words), but without which everything becomes mere noise.
When the brilliant Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer wrote his Third Book on Painting, in which he documented his ideas on art, he composed a sentence famous for its lucidity: “I believe,” Dürer says, “there is no man alive, as intelligent as he may be, capable of grasping the inherent beauty of the most humble of creatures.”
This effort to discern, which Dürer believes is doomed to fail but must be undertaken nonetheless, is, in my view, the watchword of Coral Bracho’s poetry. A poetry that has seen signs of the times in the world’s most modest manifestations, that seeks through the senses the most subtle of essences, and that is undaunted by the task of naming the terrible.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
