Adam Day

It’s difficult picking up another collection of poetry after finishing Burn the Losses; it’s such a damn compelling and spellbinding book that many others pale in comparison. It certainly isn’t a sunny collection of poems, but it is stunning both in image and in idea.

The legendary Spanish author, Antonio Gamoneda, has only one other collection of poetry published in English: Book of the Cold (2022, World Poetry Books), translated by the same team who translated Burn the Losses. I ordered it immediately after finishing Burn the Losses. Gamoneda is little known in the U.S. He was born in Oviedo, Asturias, Spain in 1931 and grew up in a working-class neighborhood in León, a significant area of conflict during the Spanish Civil War. His father, also a poet, died when Antonio was a year old, and his mother raised him. He taught himself to read by way of his father’s poetry. At age fourteen he left school and began working at a bank; something he would do, in different capacities, for twenty-four years. Gamoneda was deeply involved in the resistance movement opposed to the bloody dictatorship of Francisco Franco. In that context and beyond, he has become one of the most highly honored poets writing in the Spanish language. Yet, he is not necessarily considered to be in the mainstream of Spanish poetry, for as Daniel-Aguirre-Oteiza put it, Gamoneda’s poetry is “marked by non-linear, disjunctive, de-centered, multivocal, self-reflective linguistic acts.” Still, it is an accessible poetry.

Among other things, Burn the Losses portrays the author, aged 93 at this time, struggling with aging, change, and loss, particularly his own inevitable demise, as when he tells us “I have wasted away needlessly // in the memories and the shadows.” The speaker later tells us that he “sits to contemplate death, / but sees nothing more than lamps and flies and the legends / of funeral ribbons.” As Katherine M. Hedeeen phrased it in her translator’s note to Book of the Cold, “A subtle eroticism persists throughout, insisting on “the physical intertwining with symptoms of decline and illness,”” as when Gamoneda tells us “Beneath the ant activity // there were eyelids and there was // water mortal in the ditches. /// Still in my heart // there are ants.” Or simply, “There is no / distinction between my flesh and my sadness.”

The collection’s second section is entitled, “Comes Oblivion.” Here are emptiness and aloneness. “We are alone between two negations like bones left for the / dogs that won’t ever come…Still one pleasure: let us burn // in indecipherable words.” The self is seen as expelled, and the common idea that fingernails grow after death (which, they do not) is denied by the poet. Nail growth requires active cell division, which ceases upon death. The appearance of continued nail growth after death is due to dehydration, causing the skin around the nails to shrink. This shrinkage pulls the skin back, making the nails appear longer. Why focus on this? Because Gamoneda is at pains to point out that he is under no misconceptions about life, death, and afterlife. Rather, he tells us that he is “moving through oblivion.” “Through” being a complex process; a compilation of many moments.

The mother is a key figure in the collection. She is strength and stability, as one imagines she might have to be, raising a child under Franco’s practice of systematic killings, targeting of specific groups, and dehumanization of victims. Gamoneda tells us: “I saw columns of light and steel fingernails // and endured, taking hold of my mother’s hands…It was childhood before bleeding holes, // childhood scorched in its petals, lost…” But the figure of the female isn’t just one of stability and resilience: “I…Saw the maternal vagina crying and the pain in a golden bowl // and the suicides on the inside of the light.” The poet drinks “in the feminine waters // the sweetness and the shadow.” Gamoneda recognizes the inherent complexity of the other and their ties to mortality. After taking hold of the mother’s hands: “Now / I push aside black ribbons and hypodermic cannulas: // search for my mother’s hands in wardrobes shadowfilled.”

Death and absence are ever present in the collection, and this does not only pertain to lives, but to recollection, as well. Indeed, one section of the book is entitled, “Restless Clarity,” indicating the author’s willingness to wrestle with the unsayable, teetering between ambiguity and precision, while embracing the fragmentary, and while recognizing that some things are unknowable or (nearly) impossible to render. “Old age is like this: restless clarity.” The poet further states, “Memory is mortal,” and “I believe in the disappearance.” And in the context of Gamoneda’s life, one can hardly separate the disappearance of memory from the thousands disappeared by Franco during Gamoneda’s earlier years: “Still losing their minds // those mothers in my veins.” And later: “Now my eyes see in the past: great motionless flowers, mothers / tormented in their children, lichen fertilized by the sadness. /// Now there are nothing more than invisible faces.”

Further, this brings to mind the lost children of Francoism; children who were kidnapped from Republican parents, who were either in jail or had been assassinated by Nationalist troops, during the Spanish Civil War and Francoist Spain. For as Miguel Casado puts it, Gamoneda’s poetry is where “facts become fragmented turning into sensations, into isolated context clues, into transporters of echoes of earlier times.” Indeed, Gamoneda tells us: “Someone whistles in my heart. I do not know who it is but I / understand their unending syllable…I / myself am the strange animal.” This is also indicative of Gamoneda’s seeming belief in the unseen, the overlooked, the apparently forgotten and yet the author resists closure, telling us, “There is light within the shadow...” Or stating: “Now / there is no other passion than indifference,” while querying, “And so, what lost clarity do we come from? Who can remember / the nonexistence?”  

Thus, Gamoneda resists answers, encouraging the courage to not know, in the face of loss, in the face of oncoming death, reminding us both that “There is music before the abyss,” and that the speaker “spoke of one who watches in me when I sleep, of the / stranger hidden in memory. Will he die too? // I do not know.”