No Shelter: The Selected Poems of Pura López-Colomé
"Gander's translation is a pleasure to read. He provides us with a live
version of López-Colomé poetry in English and continues his work of invigorating
the English language itself….his English versions are living, breathing
texts in dialogue with the original….Gander's choice of sounds and words
all serve to create aa poetic movement equivalent to that of the original
Spanish."
-Mark Schafer, Web-del-sol, Perihelion , September 2002
"In forms that blur poetry and prose, López-Colomé uses a spare language to explore the music of dream, faith and faithlessness, history and memory."
-Translation Review Supplement , Volume 8, No. 1, July 2002
"López-Colomé's poems make obvious use of her influences, exploring
meaning through Beckett- and Stein-like repetition, compressing these
reveries into adamantine lines reminiscent of H. D. and Gluck or spinning
out into prose passages suggestive of early Hass. Yet López-Colomé's erudition
does not overwhelm her poems, and her own voice is far too singular to
be subsumed by her forebears or contemporaries. Her poems dart in and
out of obvious meaning, teasing sense out of obscurity, philosophical
inquiry out of incantatory repetition and variation. In No Shelter:
the Selected Poems of Pura López-Colomé, Forrest Gander (himself
a difficult and rewarding poet) selects poems from López-Colomé's three
middle books and weaves them together to create a sense of her obsessions,
if not the progress of her artistic evolution."
-Ted Genoways, Ruminator Revew , Fall 2002
"Pura López-Colomé is fascinated by the melodiousness of rhetoric exemplified
by her translations of Paul Celan. There is an atheistic religiosity in
her oeuvre, a lack of sincerity that is effective. (To her translator,
she said: 'Sincerity and veracity are distinct.') She seems to be stationed
in a single place while the labyrinthine universe rotates around her.
Her poetry is an alchemy through which she lets herself travel, as if
in a dream, through the layers of stimulation that envelope her, such
as in her work 'Death of the Kiss.'"
-Edward Hirsch, Washington Post Book World (in a review of Reversible
Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry)
"Poet Forrest Gander has shown courage in translating an unknown and complex poet like Mexican Pura López-Colomé. Her work in the original Spanish is surreal, dense, and gothic. Gander has transformed a challenging Spanish into poems that breathe in English and resonate with the best avant-garde traditions of American poetry, while they show new approaches to daring poetic forms."
-Ray Gonzalez, The Bloomsbury Review , Sept/Oct 2002
"No Shelter is made up of only eight poems, all arresting in
their tortured explorations…. The elegance of López-Colomé is equaled
by thhe intensity of her images. She is masterly in her insight that what
makes memory is the appearance of the intangible…. Gander ought to bee
congratulated for making this fine poet available-in crisp, euphoniious
versions-to an English-language audience, for hers is a unique vvoice.
She defies the stereotype of Mexican poetry as self-indulgently concerned
solely with the nation's past. Instead, she establishes her oeuvre in
an ontological tradition associated with Celan, a tradition difficult
to crack open, but, once its meanings are on full display, dazzling in
its rewards."
-Ilan Stavans, Michigan Quarterly Review , Spring 2003
"Though the subtitle declares No Shelter to be "The Selected
Poems of Pura Lopez- Colome," the selection, from three of the five books
López-Colomé has published to date, is executed so intelligently, so smoothly,
so musically, that the collection forms, in and of itself, the trajectory
of a book."
-Jen Hofer,No Magazine, Spring 2003