photo by Forrest Gander

Coral Bracho: an Introduction

In Spanish, Bracho’s early poems read as though they were poured onto the page. They are fluid, lapping long-lined toward the gutters.  Her images evoke an oneiric, sensual realm of dispelled logics.  Her diction spills out along ceaselessly shifting beds of sound.  Try reading this aloud, even if you don’t speak Spanish:

            Dicen del tacto

            de su destellos

            de los juegos tranquilos que delizan al borde,

            a la orilla lenta de los ocasos.

            De sus labios de hielo.

Bracho’s early poems make sense first as music, and music propels them. The grammar seems to liquefy and run.  Rhythms pulse and build, echoes are bandied back and form between lines, and subordinate clauses drift off on their own.  Like recombinant DNA, Bracho’s strings of syntax break and recombine and collaborate to spark life.  If you try to put your finger on the meaning of a poem, the meaning seems to move elsewhere, and so you begin to focus on feeling the poem, engaging it as an active movement taking place on the page and in also in your own mind.  

If the early work seems inspired by quantum mechanics, stressing uncertainties and  syntactical structures that often make sense as two simultaneous, interpenetrating patterns, the poems from The Pleasures of Amber depend upon more Euclidian modes:  parallel syntactical patterns, anaphoric lines, and short subject-verb-object sentences.  In these poems, Bracho is not averse to resolving a poem in simple, if enigmatic, declarations: “The stags cross over the border lines” or “I would go to heaven.” 

The booklength poem That Space, That Garden and the new shorter poems that have followed it seem to forge out of Bracho’s earlier styles a capacious new virtuosity.  While the poems can be abstract, the intensifying cadence and the effect of scattered talismanic words drawing together into a symphonic crescendo ensure that the work is experienced sensually as well as intellectually.  While never intending to mirror the world in snapshot images, Bracho increasingly tunes in to the frequency of things, the thicket of things that comprise a region, a room, a relationship.  Her meditation on the palpable edge of thingness—the surface of trees, furniture, skin—leads her to an intuition of volume, depth, inhabiting spirit.  Radiating lines of perspective and shifting, ambiguous pronouns lead us across the borders of familiar language tropes into a concentrated attentiveness, a bedazzled listening.  Removed from any central vantage point, we discover a world of uncanny interrelationships, our own world: complex, provisional, but intact.    

Many years ago, when I was living in Dolores Hidalgo, Mexico, I found a copy of El Ser Que Va a Morir at the local bookstand, next to the Super Macho magazines.  I was astonished by it.  In terms of both style and subject matter, it was utterly unique.  The poems made me think of Gaudi architecture, but underwater.  They share that sideways-slipping meditative grace of John Ashbery’s poems, the exotic lexical range of J.H. Prynne, and a vivid sensuality that English-language readers might liken to Gertrude Stein’s Lifting Belly or to certain sequences by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.

Asked for a statement about her aesthetics for an anthology I was editing, Bracho responded, “My feeling is that any such statement would implicitly be an evaluation that I think is not up to me to make.  Besides that, I think it would also stand between the reader and the texts and set up a limited pattern of approach.”

For me, the pleasures of her poems derive from their open-endedness, from their music, their delicious vocabulary, and from the tensions between an insistently telic rhythm and a dehiscent narrative.  As readers, we sense that our arrival is imminent, but the destination keeps being rewritten.

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One the Day of the Dead, in 1994, when Carlos Fuentes was in Providence and over for dinner—a disastrous event since for some inexplicable reason I decided to serve an “authentic” Mexican meal—we spoke about Mexican poetry and found ourselves praising Coral Bracho’s work.  As we finished the last bottle of wine, virtually the only palatable substance on the table, Fuentes drew onto a napkin a portrait of Coral Bracho.  He said that, unfortunately, he had never met her, but from her work, he imagined that she looked like this:

(but you'll have to wait for the book, reader....)