Pere Gimferrer

Even though Pere Gimferrer contains a selection of Pere Gimferrer’s work from 1963 to 2016, this book is not meant to be definitive, as the translator Adrian Nathan West relates in his foreword. A two-time winner of Spain’s National Poetry Prize, Gimferrer, who was a member of the 1970s group of experimental poets Novísimos, writes across multiple genres and in several languages. Yet this bilingual sampling of the poet’s much lauded career is almost understated: there are no notes, no markers of when or where a poem was originally published in Spanish, Catalan, or Italian. Instead, the poet’s epic and grandiloquent poems are allowed to speak for themselves. Lines like “The grass delimits, between rain and lace, / the immobile phosphorescence of the garden” convey one of Gimferrer’s favored subjects, the expansive and unsettled realm of light and shadow, of color and reflection. Long lyric sequences, with their Baroque nostalgia and dexterous historical and literary references, draw upon a gilded European cultural tradition in order to question the poet’s role in stimulating the “world’s unmaking.”

Occasionally, Gimferrer’s profuse succession of images can feel sticky in their dense saturation, but the poems are, overall, impressively rich. Take the lucid and brilliant strangeness of imagery like “The sea, like a goldfinch, / resided in the boughs” or “A flare of lightning, soft as the blood of a wounded / dolphin.” Equally distinctive are West’s translations; one might struggle to find many contemporary American poems risking the slant-rhyme flair of “pallid tongue. / Pelagic pentagram” as a translation of “pálido lenguaje. / Pentagrama marino”(!).

Ultimately, Pere Gimferrer is a book made stronger by its grandeur of flavor, its unabashed decadence of lyric wonder. Gimferrer’s verse, a little out of step with what might be traditionally expected, marks a unique and charismatic path, wavering across unorthodox registers and syntax, between elegy and hymn, the metaphysical and romantic, old and new.