The Lady of Elche

In her second book to appear in English, Amanda Berenguer undergoes a brutal transformation into the namesake of her book, the Lady of Elche, a limestone bust from the 4th century BC:

spadefuls of slaked lime
dry white blows
memories of oxygen
turned the wheels with settings
or empty alveoli

The title and subtitle of the collection, The Lady of Elche: The Vocable Is the Voyage, foreshadow this conversion. If we think of the colon as a gate, we might imagine the Lady—a hermetically silent sculpture—breaching through to the potential of speech. At the same time, the subtitle suggests a passage of sorts that coheres with the final poem, “(Entrance to the Word)”:

I recognized that swampy light
reclining like a green jello cow—
[…]
the water sealed like a jaw
 of anthracite and moss
 remained engrossed

Berenguer devises a headlong descent with vertiginous shifts leading to a precipice where the “word” is a place that looks like a cave. At its mouth, she cites famous descenders of chasms such as Odysseus and Aeneas. To my ears, her brazen disposition paired with an acute intelligence recalls the descent of Ishtar.

There are several wonders along the way—figs with “flagrant gaze[s]” and “pulsating anemone”—alongside complex plays on metaphor and logic: “I lived with the vigilant sun / a guardian / maybe a prison made of mirrors / a watchful syllogism?” In “Descent,” Berenguer pulls a “distant lamb” close to the “bleating froth” with a couple of precise dashes.

Berenguer is considered one of Uruguay’s greatest experimentalists; in an interview about the poet, the late Kent Johnson (one of the editors of her previous collection, Materia Prima) pointed out how “‘radically unlike’ herself she is from book to book. Each book […] is as if written by a wholly different author.” It is to the credit of exceptional translators like Kristin Dykstra that Berenguer’s work has started trickling into English, though even now the English reader has barely begun her descent into Berenguer’s poetic realms.