{"id":11124,"date":"2019-12-14T21:09:58","date_gmt":"2019-12-14T20:09:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11124"},"modified":"2019-12-14T21:14:48","modified_gmt":"2019-12-14T20:14:48","slug":"amanda-berenguer-materia-prima-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11124","title":{"rendered":"Amanda Berenguer | Materia Prima<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amanda Berenguer | Materia Prima: Selected Poems of Amanda Berenguer <\/em> | Ugly Duckling Press: $22<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Materia Prima<\/em> is the first extended single publication of Amanda Berenguer\u2019s poetry in English. Berenguer was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1921, and spent much of the rest of her life there; although she did have extended visits to the USA and Europe. Her editors cite her as an important member of the Generaci\u00f3n del 45, a group of Uruguayan literary figures who emerged as roughly the same time. It is clear from even the short biography accompanying this volume that Berenguer was both precocious and prolific; she published her first book when she was nineteen and the contents page lists some twenty four collections published between that first volume and her death in 2010. <\/p>\n

That large quantity contains a huge range of forms and attitudes, and this Selected<\/em> is a compendious collection. There are a number of long poems here including The Lady of Leche<\/em>, an extraordinary meditation on what it means to live in the twentieth century in the swirl of cultural histories, but also to have a domestic and female identity in the same period. However, \u2018meditation\u2019 would suggest a serenity which this tumultuous outpouring often doesn\u2019t have. It begins: <\/p>\n

I\u2019m Amanda \u2013 from Montevideo-
\ndaughter of Amanda, cow-eyed
\n                                      contemporary deity
\n                                      blackbird heart with lightning bolts
\nwhere the flash that shatters night comes to roost
\n                it flaps joy inciting life
\ndaughter of Rimmel, father
\n                                      fighting cock
\n                                      cruel Cerberus
\n                                      or tender marrow under the feathers
\n                                      almost bearings almost arrows <\/p>\n

To suggest that this writing is surreal is not quite right. It is true that there is a yoking of images with a kind of violence. At the same time, as we can see here, that yoking has a hard-fought precision about it. And, as the editors contend, there is a sensuality and authority about the writing which gives it heft and presence beyond the surreal, bricolage of images. The stringing together of the phrases which follow the second Amanda, above, seem both to juxtapose with an interesting resonance. How do you have \u2018cow eyes\u2019 and also a \u2018blackbird heart\u2019; there\u2019s an implicit contrast in physical weight between the cow and the blackbird even when the epithets are attached to \u2018eyes\u2019 and \u2018heart\u2019. And yet the heart certainly runs on its own electricity so that \u2018lightning bolts\u2019 doesn\u2019t feel far-fetched. In addition there is the translator\u2019s miraculously subtle alliteration of \u2018cow-eyed\u2019 with \u2018contemporary deity\u2019, which, again, creates subtle links in the music. <\/p>\n

The editors of this collection claim \u2018objective specificity and phenomenological tracking\u2019 for Berenguer\u2019s writing throughout her writing career. And they are right. The collection, Composition of Space<\/em>, from 1976, contains a series of poems, \u2018Sea-sunset from (Day and Date, 1972)\u2019. These poems are a kind of equivalent of Monet\u2019s paintings of Rouen Cathedral, an essential difference being that three of the poems are dated on consecutive days in February, 1972. The four poems begin as follows: \u2018Molten lead the air falls\u2019, \u2018Vast blue \/ becomes ambiguous green\u2019, \u2018A lone fleeting fruit \/ disproportionate\u2019, and \u2018The entire day from ripe zenith\u2019. Each of those opening lines then becomes the title for a concrete poem which explores the kind of movement that Berenguer sees in the sunset. Each of the \u2018conventional\u2019 poems that follows those openings is a patient and forceful exploration of the scene thrown up by the \u2018sea-sunset\u2019. The first of these is a single sentence whose first nine lines are: \u2018Molten lead the air falls \/ stone the sky falls\/ over the bitter and black \/ saltwater it falls \/ we\u2019re here to peer \/ into the deepest well \/ the dunes pile in \/ some crawl \/ spacious turtles of silence\u2019 Of course, the lyric poet in the twentieth century lives with the legacy of objectivism and modernism. But Berenguer\u2019s determined gaze creates portraits of considerable depth and beauty. And she creates a seemingly effortless combination of space and intimacy. Here, the air is yoked to lead and stone and the sand dunes to \u2018spacious turtles\u2019. Again, the translator renders Berenguer\u2019s Spanish into these lines of, often, monosyllables with the rhymes of \u2018falls\u2019, \u2018well\u2019, \u2018pile\u2019, and \u2018crawl\u2019, moving to the cadence of that last quoted line. <\/p>\n

Berenguer\u2019s determined gaze is turned on her own aging body in the suitably titled, \u2018A Study in Wrinkles: Contributions to the Field of Cosmetology\u2019. As you might imagine, this is both physically and psychologically detailed. However, Berenguer turns the female gaze not only on the female body but also on the way men relate to that. The poem is a set of 63 prose sections, and number 31 runs as follows:
\n 
\n 
\n\tThe earlobes have fewer wrinkles because they don\u2019t have anything to do.<\/p>\n

\tThey can do nothing, and the sound still gets in. <\/p>\n

The mouth, on the other hand, gets wrinkled because it works so hard: it opens and closes the door all day long: it\u2019s the porter for supplies and the porter for words. <\/p>\n

The eyelids are specialized porters for the light that comes in and the gaze that comes out. Eyelids get much more wrinkled: they have the task of guarding the lighthouse on the sea.
\n 
\n 
\nAgain we have here, Berenguer\u2019s ability to push an idea. In the first three parts, the observation is interesting and in the context of the whole offers a deeper excursion into her investigation into wrinkles and the female condition. However, these observations are not Berenguer at her most original. The final section here moves into a larger metaphorical sense of the job of the eyes, themselves; that the eyes allow us to be aware, not only of danger but the way our awareness can guard others through our own presence. But then comes the twist of the knife:
\n 
\n     32)
\n     The wrinkles that men wear on the inside of their skins are called obsessions. <\/p>\n

     33)
\n     The little obsessions are internal wrinkles in the form of trained monkeys, from which it      follows that wrinkles and training are the same engine.
\n 
\nAs before, in part it is the plainness of the language in these translations which make them effective. But, just as much, it is Berenguer\u2019s intellectual imagination, which reaches into the ideas and carves out these neat, particularised little places; places where the ideas and her take on them resonate not only with irony but also with a piercing sense of their fitness, the way Berenguer makes them apt. <\/p>\n

Materia Prima<\/em> is an important document which introduces the English speaking world to a poet of huge technical and emotional resource. The translations seem excellent and contain a range of felicities which allow Berenguer\u2019s poetry to both breath and reach out. <\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amanda Berenguer | Materia Prima: Selected Poems of Amanda Berenguer | Ugly Duckling Press: $22 Materia Prima is the first extended single publication of Amanda Berenguer\u2019s poetry in English. 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