Aurora Pura López-Colomé Translated from Spanish by Jason Stumpf $17 / 127 pp / paper isbn 978-1-905700-38-7 Shearsman

Review by Craig Santos Perez

Aurora is the name of a natural light phenomenon produced by the collision of charged particles from the magnetosphere with atoms and molecules of the upper atmosphere. Aurora is the name of the Roman goddess of dawn, who renews herself every morning by flying across the sky to announce the sun’s arrival.

López-Colomé’s poems are light displays in and of themselves, flashing across the sky of the silent page with Stumpf’s translations acting as auroral translations to capture, through the lens of English, López-Colomé’s brilliance:

El otro mundo.

La luz me abrió sus puertas
cuando quería seguir el cauce
de este sueño
grave, ensombrecido,
en dirección contraria al día.
Una dorada catarata:
polvo de crystal,
palabra nunca vista,
aurora.
Nuevo el peso.
Nuevo el brillo.

The other world.

Light opened its doors to me
when I wanted to follow the course
of that solemn,
dark dream
in a direction against the day.
A golden waterfall,
fine needles
pierced my blindness:
crystal dust,
word never seen,
aurora.
New balance.
New brilliance.

Throughout Aurora, the poet struggles between opened light and dark dream, between blindness and sight, between this world and the other. The poems arise from these continual collisions, where each word’s “sound doesn’t seem to have an echo, / it goes in search, / in search of the aurora” (“sonido no parece tener eco, / va en su busca, / en busca de la aurora”).

Within this search, López-Colomé embarks on a kind of echo-location, measuring how light moves between worlds and words to understand the acts of light and “la naturaleza / de milagro” (“the nature / of miracle”). She writes:

Construyes los días,
los edificios de tu vida.
Hablando con las cosas,
te vas metiendo en ellas
paso a paso,
entre las olas cadenciosas
del sueño.

You build the days,
the structures of your life.
Talking with things,
you get mixed up in them
step by step,
between the rhythmic waves
of dream.

The rhythmic waves of light weave dream with the structure of days. López-Colomé manages to see both things—the quotidian angles of light—and the angles of things shining against “las cáscaras oscuras” (“the dark shells”) of words. The poet, like Aurora, renews herself on each page to announce the brief moment of arrival, when the light of perception rises in “[t]he ear, and within, / the cave’s brief echo” (“El oído, y dentro, / el eco breve de una gruta”).

Formally, many of the poems in Aurora are serially constructed. For example, the first section of the book, titled “Aurora”, presents a single poem, “To Good Shelter”, which is composed of three parts. The third part is then broken into ten sections. This structure—or shelter—creates an interesting descent: “[i]ntoned, broken, / blunted, the passage / of light fingers / over crystal keys” (“Se entona, rompe, / despunta el paso / de ligeros dedos / sobre el teclado de crystal”). López-Colomé suggests that the passage of light—and the writing of the passage of light—is a broken collision intoned in the mind—and on the page—as “crystal keys”.

In a powerful moment of recognition, the poet addresses Aurora:

Aurora,
tus ojos son el aire.
Se absorben
y sienten
en lo recóndito de un eco.
Aquél.
Aurora,

your eyes are air.
They absorb
and sense themselves
hidden in an echo.
There.

If we understand Aurara as not light itself but as the arrival of light, then we can understand the poet as always searching for that arrival, for the moment when blindness becomes a new balance and brilliance. López-Colomé emphasizes the “echo” to show how light isn’t some essence out “there”, but that light is hidden in the echo of the mind, where “there” exists simultaneously “here”.

“To Good Shelter”, which might refer to the world itself or to the space of the poem, ends:

Déjame soñar
tu material indissoluble,
tocar la frente al alba,
volver en mí, a mí,
siempre despierta.

Let me dream
of your unchangeable substance,
let me touch the forehead of dawn,
let me return to myself, as myself,
awake always.

I’ve only focused on the first section of Aurora partly because it opens the collection and partly because it’s the most compelling section in the book. Throughout the remaining sections, the overall structure established by “To Good Shelter” becomes diffused into singular poems, serial poems, and prose / lyric blends. This diffusion isn’t necessarily a structural flaw, but merely a structural consequence of starting a book with such a complexly structured and lyrically powerful serial poem.

All the other poems return to (and are sometimes subsumed by) the major themes established in the first section, examining those themes in variable lights: “La memoria, en ti, es un reflector de luz activa, / momento justo” (“Memory, in you, is a protector of enabling light, at that moment”); “Aquella eternal fonte está ascondida, / qué bien sé yo donde?tiene su manida, / aunque es de noche” (Its eternal font is hidden. / Even so, how well I know from where it flows, / though it is night”); “La noche no es habitación cerrada. / Es aire sin esencias. / Nacimiento.” (“Night is not a locked house. / It is air without essences. / Birth”).

López-Colomé’s poems don’t end in things nor do they disappear into abstraction. Instead, she protects the moment when poetry enables us to see light echo between the world and our perception of the world. She knows the miracle of light, the renewal of birth, and the joy of being awake always:

Hay vientos, tiempos
que son ritmo,
soplo fértil,
mente incontenible
como el cielo,
y liquida
como la sangre.

There are winds, times
that are rhythmic,
fertile blowing,
mind wild
as the heavens,
and fluid
like blood.