Poemas/Poems
Gerardo Deniz (edited and translated by Monica de la Torre)
publisher: Ditoria / Lost Roads Publishers, 2001
isbn: 0-918786-51-7
price: $12.50
As the biographical appendix to this rather luxurious edition -- measuring 8 x 10, illustrated on glossy pages, it is a bargain for the price -- Mexican poet Deniz's first passion in life was chemistry, and an interest in the sciences, including zoology, cartography, linguistics and anthropology (he is a translator of Claude Levi-Strauss), informs not only the content of his work -- polysyllabic words abound -- but the bemused "outsider" nature of his approach to life.
Not unlike another poet with a science background, Gottfried Benn, or an avowed influence, T.S. Eliot, Deniz's writing is often clinical and unflinching, and yet the mundane, not to mention the shocking, sports freely among his abstruser musings.
The poem "Auditor" reduces its protagonist, a somewhat sycophantic student, into a pair of steaming hands "cooked... in a thick sauce, the color of a sparrow, / with peas, mushrooms, nuts, capers," while "Dawn, August 15, 1983 (From memory)" recounts the pleasures of thinking about such things as the "biogenesis of picrotoxinin," only to conclude:
all this which we minor spirits do with major issues,
bites and penetrates reality (in case it means something)
a thousand times more than the sordid medicine kit of abstract powders, intellectualoid mouth washes, dialectic suppositories,
with names of thinkers (so many German, now also French) on their labels.
[19]
There is a mythic quality to his imagination, but one which never leaves the realm of the physical even when considering abstract subjects, as when he recounts how he took "gluttony by a braid" and broke her leg -- "it sounded (and felt) as if I were breaking a loaf of excellent bread" -- or in the poem "Crime," which begins:
Every afternoon analogy takes her demon out to pee on deck.
With leaden forearms, knees, thumbs, on all fours, it crawls by iron sheets,
it sniffs bushes, shrubs, either recognizing them or growing passionate
and tugging at the leash.
[65]
Deniz, born Juan Almela in 1934 in Madrid and the son of an exiled Spanish socialist and bookmaker, is undoubtedly a major poet, and for all of his erudition and uncompromising concision is supremely enjoyable, especially for lovers of intellectual tour guides of the possible like Borges and Ashbery.
The volume, divided into thematic sections with titles like "Freudian Poems" and "Poet in the classroom," has been beautifully translated by de la Torre, conveying the unique ironic tone and generous breadth of this poet who has been, until now, nearly unknown in the States.
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