By Merrill Kaitz

In Maria Baranda’s poetry there is the constant oscillation between beauty and ugliness, elegance and terror, the empowering journey and the overwhelming nightmare.

The New World Written: Selected Poems of Maria Baranda. Translated from the Spanish; Edited by Paul Hoover. Yale University Press, 272 pages, $30.

About to turn 60, Maria Baranda, an honored poet of Mexico, has had several books translated into the American idiom. Still, The New World Written: Selected Poems is something of a literary event in the US, given that it contains extensive samplings from each of her 13 volumes of mostly longish poems.

Baranda’s poems do not make entry easy. They are psychological and surreal, often loaded with monsters. Her work provides a bestiary as fierce as those found in the Odyssey, Beowulf, or The Waste Land. There’s little in the way of traditional narration, and her verse leaps from first person to second person to third person. The poems no doubt challenge the volume’s 10 translators as they do its readers: what are these poems about, and what’s the point of all these idiosyncratic images?

Editor Paul Hoover, who is also one of the translators, has done a heroic job of pulling things together. The volume is arranged in an unconventional way; he presents the poet’s newest book, A Hive of Seabirds (2015), first, and then proceeds, in reverse chronological order, back to her earliest book, If We Have Lost Our Oldest Tales (1990), which concludes with a poem entitled “The Garden of Enchantments,” (1989). Thus, if we view the book as a kind of journey, we will discover that the poet’s ending has become her beginning. This works well enough, but the reader needs to be aware of it; there is a continual temptation to jump forward and then back again to aid understanding.

The selection labeled “From The Garden of Enchantments” comes in sections labeled with Roman numerals. We are given numbers I, III, VIII, IX, XI, and XIII. The episodes seem to describe mental states rather than events. It’s possible that the order represents stages in a drama: a woman is growing up, from childhood to maturity, becoming educated in the rough ways of a rough world. So in part I (or is it poem I?), we hear:

They spoke of the sea in great phrases:

of its salt skin and white feathers….

 

A lovely and lyrical description. But as is Baranda’s method throughout the volume, she quickly undercuts it with troubling images:

…of the penance that mothers lay,

with poplin dresses,

as seaweed bridges

for their daughters’ vulvas

 

This embrace of juxtaposition is at the heart of Baranda’s vision, which develops considerable cumulative power over the course of  The New World Written. The anatomical reference may startle, but the idea that femaleness demands penance is one of the most powerful statements in her earliest book. Sometimes the environmental dangers re almost gentle:

I undressed and enjoyed being that way, happy

in the disorder of that land

so far from the sea

yet so close,

with its nest of murderous birds

and its crying trees…

 

Even the evocations of death and tears don’t yet undercut completely the mood of innocence. But that will happen soon enough:

I grew up where time lasted,

where the ragged dream

shone

…

between blue walls crossed by imps

that knew wonderful stories….

But a creak was enough

in that pigsty of beautiful legends,

in that urinal where our life was diluted.

 

Again and again, dream flips into nightmare. Part I finishes:

The softest noise

on the wooden planks

was enough

for the sea

to awake with the dead face

of far away things.

 

It is a beautiful and troubling piece, worthy of being noted and remembered.
The next piece, III, again opens lyrically:

I was a girl then

and sitting at the wind’s gate…

 

and then, as before, the feeling is transformed through the arrival of a terrible reality. The images come in fragments, though something like a narrative is suggested:

Thus sometimes,

when the sun disputed the dreams

woven of great stories,

our eyes were wide…

 

And the women spoke of bird shit

at the basins of the dream…

 

they spoke of the names of our trees,

of the polished wood

where the steps of a dead child echoed.

 

It seems that these are tales told by women to their daughters — compelling, but also awful, cautionary tales. Are they fiction or fact, dream or reality? This would be a false dichotomy — clearly they are both. There is always beauty, but the horrors always return:

Ah, I remember

the first sights of the eucalyptus trees…

 

the vast ignorance that descends

through the sticks of dead seasons.

 

…and I watered your flowers

while a woman aborted in the waiting room.

 

Maybe the narrator is growing, and moving to the center of the story:

I waited

humming a song with closed eyes,

the moment to lay out, for you, a prayer mat

woven with the skin of my desires.

 

The ending of III is softer than the rawness of I, but its alarming portrait of the situation of women and men is clear enough:

You, my brother, like a wisp of sun,

have made yourself heard everywhere.

And I, who was then a child,

sat at the wind’s gate

to listen to that bird,

the way you listen to a dream

long forgotten.

 

In part IX, the narrator’s imagery, and possibly her own and her sisters’ fortunes, seem to be looking up:

Hail the multitude of wives and emissaries

that nest in the mouth of lightning!

 

Yet darker images, including harsh anatomical symbols, undercut intimations of the world’s beneficence:

The cloud shudders… and its rags

make you think of enemas

on virgin mares…

You sing

and your song gives birth to berries for men

of another Fatherland.

 

By part XI, difficulty, sadness, and tragedy have taken over:

Why are we so far away? The trees

have bequeathed their leaves to weeds…

 

And someone, between poultices and yeast,

begs,

with that sweet voice of the ill,

for a little bit of sea.

 

The section ends with a grim vision of destructive relations between men and women:

…the men wear their fear in the open,

at night

they show their eyes still reddened by desire.

…the women,

high sentries,

prophesy flight

with their masks of silence.

 

“The Garden of Enchantments” concludes with Section XIII,  a harshly vernacular but sardonic drama of mourning:

Begetters of the first word

they were brought by the first grandmothers:

 

“Sing in the White Mansion of the Sea

a brief, sour, and smelly song

that will make us weep.”

 

So ends the poem, or cycle of poems, that makes up “The Garden of Enchantments.” In later books, Baranda follows the divergent paths and exercises of her surrealistic imagination in a variety of ways, but the boundaries of the journey have been set in this Garden.  There is a great deal of enchantment, and much ugliness, in these pages. Baranda’s worlds may be brave and new, but they are populated by murderous birds, terrible storms, and treacherous men. I was reminded of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: “I think we are in rats’ alley/ where the dead men lost their bones.”

From Baranda’s early work in The New World Written, let’s jump to her latest, A Hive of Seabirds, which starts off this collection. Its opening poem, “The Beach,” is 17 pages long and is made up of 10 parts numbered with Roman numerals. The framework, in other words, looks pretty similar to the form Baranda had been using 25 years earlier.

If we can judge from the poem’s opening, the world hasn’t improved much:

Here you are…

about to attend the meeting of fear…

about to encounter that open land of truth

that has pushed you to the vertigo of all your dreams.

Here you are at the gate and you don’t know how to open it.

 

Much of the poem is written in the second person, though sometimes it reverts to the first person. The “you” that is being addressed could be the reader, or it could be one of the selves that inhabit the psyche of the poet/narrator. It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to take “the vertigo of all your dreams” as referring to either an individual psychic landscape or the actual landscape of our current wasteland. Some images are the stuff of nightmare, but they run alongside other images that evoke survival and tenderness:

   Bats enter through the five senses

of your five fingers…

   Only darkness scrutinizes the dementia,

seeks the anger, the new fire or pardon that undresses

the softest skin of a trembling heart.

 

Part II brings more of the same:

The scorpions hide themselves in your shadow.

 

“Between the motion/ and the act/ falls the shadow,” T.S. Eliot wrote in The Hollow Men. Baranda continues her variation on this theme:

All life enclosed frenzied…

only your mother withers inside her skirt.

…Who are you behind that spit?

 

…a stranger divides the swamp of fear

and its invisible sympathy for suicide.

 

The nightmare keeps gathering force:

The features of your thirst are a single irrevocable line

the point of a cursed heart…

beside the rope that snared

   the lone tyrant night

the lone and idiot night that confessed your blood.

 

That is the penultimate line of Section II, but the final line, in italics, sounds a different note:

Let’s talk little by little, nothing is certain.

 

Part III is brief. The poetic voice takes on a prophetic air:

   Nothing that’s here belongs to you.

You have lived under the furniture, behind the portraits,

next to the moth-holes…

 

The section’s ending predicts a grim transformation:

Now the street takes you to other obsessions,

   rituals where faith crumbles

   in markers made of coal.

 

And the first two lines of Part IV suggest that a superficial change may lead to a threatening transformation:

You want a new comb

to change what you think.

 

Images of death and the grave keep returning:

You advance wet and dead by the stone.

You say the new flowers, the gravestones

of air, what has and has no importance,

is yours.

 

…You’d like to dig up her lips

but you can’t even open the door.

 

Section V consists of just four stanzas, its setting suggesting we are in the church of a dying faith:

The pews guard the emptiness of the oldest pastor.

 

And it ends with a striking and mysterious event. Departing from her usual approach, Baranda supplies more of a narrative line:

…there, in front of your island,

rolls the heart of a man

awakened in the shoes of a stranger.

 

Section VI seems almost an aside; it summons figures of Greek culture and mythology, from the Fates to Homer. In Section VII, and for the final four sections of “The Beach,” the narrator speaks in the first person:

The beings that I am break into pieces.

 

This opening line could be a description of the poet’s method and as well as the narrator’s psyche. And she (they?) continue in this dual mode:

Vocabularies in plain desperation.

Words fallen from their hands

licked by street dogs.

No one understands me. I have decided to scrutinize

the limbs of other prayers, folded

in the matter of oblivion.

   Animals and maggots

   sweet imaginings of someone I was

   someone possible….

 

It’s a moment of clarity and vulnerability. In Baranda’s poetry there is the constant oscillation between beauty and ugliness, elegance and terror, the empowering journey and the overwhelming nightmare:

Thousands of roaches run by me. Fire in my hands.

 

It’s not completely clear what kind of battle is being fought, but the last three lines of Section VII sound almost like an attempt at self-definition:

It was a fog then

and I

was scared of the men.

 

The brevity of the middle line gives the personal pronoun a stark emphasis. The staccato continues as Part VIII opens:

Fear. Fear of not being, and to not be

where one can be one or several things at a time…

 

There is powerful evocation of the nightmare environment:

Outside an angel licks the shoes

of fierce poisonous women

in the green river of red snakes.

 

What is it that our narrator fears?

Flashes of lightning seek me with their bolts….

Let no one strip me naked!

let no one remove the light from my knife of gold.

 

Some might wonder who would be more delighted to psychoanalyze the poem, Freud or Jung? (Or maybe it’s better if the narrator is protected from either of these patriarchal grandees.) Part IX begins with the image of a parasite:

A slow animal inhabits my entrails,

its cavernous skull a hole of light…

its absurd walk, its treaty with my bones….

 

At least one explanation for the poem’s title is summoned:

Sometimes the crashing sea stops on my forehead….

 

Could the narrator simply be describing a mere hangover? No, the poem reaches much deeper than that, into psyche and spirit.

The days and hours grow in me,

deep inside this austere animal…

soliloquy of a sick shadow.

 

The narrator describes a self-protective isolation:

I live thousands of miles from others

people without peace or words….

 

The men of this world are recognizable males of the 21st century, except that resemble Eliot’s straw men or Prufrock:

I know dry faces of invisible men…

men distinctly new

more servile now and more uncertain

I watch them with horror.

 

There is an ambiguity of reference in those last two lines. Is it the men, or the first person narrator, who is being described as servile and uncertain? If the translator is accurate, we are meant to grapple with this ambiguity. Only a few lines earlier, after all, the poetic persona had confessed that she shares some responsibility:

I live joined to the improbable talisman

of a mistaken reason.

 

Part X is the last. The opening lines of many of the sections in this poem are especially strong:

Terrible heart lost in thought

you lose faith…

the hammer that is heard

striking at a point in the road

of children and crabs and birds.

 

Then, almost immediately, grace once again devolves into nightmare. First, the touching image:

Be quiet, here at the edge of the forest

where the birds recite

their long accumulated solitude…

 

Followed by the reversal:

…so that you,

terrible heart of chisels,

in this dry land can curse them.

 

The poem is back in the third person again, although the poetic persona is addressing her own heart. The only job that is left to the heart in this world is to raise up a vision of delicacy and then tear it down. The persona’s final instruction to herself makes this explicit:

leave off then, all that happens

when the joy of a distant age

is only one more cry

in the deep and blurred imagination of the vulture.

 

It seems the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but with the voices of vultures as they dine on death:

The vultures are the gate for the dead…

 

One more hope to ask of the moon

and a red road for the world….

 

So “The Beach” ends, its vision of horror leavened by a paradoxical beauty made from a mixture of grace, hope, and regret.

As early as her third book (Impossible Dwellings, 1997), Baranda had already echoed — or extended– Tennyson’s lines from “In Memoriam A.H.H.” The sentiment is Tennyson’s, but it could almost be Baranda:

Man…

…trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation’s final law —

Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

…shriek’d against his creed….

 

Baranda introduced Impossible Dwellings with the italicized lines below — their connection to “The Beach” is clear enough:

  What is that God

   to be praised with all our sadness

   if not love

   or at least the wonder

   of being a body full of blood.  

 

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Merrill Kaitz published the poetry magazine Zeugma, studied with Anne Sexton, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Monroe Engel, and was once 12th-rated Scrabble player in North America.