Theophylline

“It is a lonely thing, this asthma,” Canadian poet and translator Erín Moure writes, observing that the condition separates the individual from the socius (a term she defines as “a social centre of responsibility to and in the world”). Theophylline takes its title from a compound used to treat asthma, and the book considers, through the lens of Moure’s chronic illness, three US Modernist authors—Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, and Angelina Weld Grimké—each of whom made “migrations,” and all of whom “are formed by elsewheres.” Prose narrative is interwoven with poems by the three authors and Moure, as well as poems written under Moure’s heteronym, Elisa Sampedrín.

In Theophylline, the poet’s interaction with Rukeyser, Bishop, and Grimké is itself a translation, as she beautifully explains: “I arrive across a border to apprehend an American poetry of the 20th century as a translator might approach works in another tongue.” The poem “Catalogue” evokes the tragedy of pioneering authors’ hard work being consigned to moulder: “None of them in circulation. / None even in storage. / Catalogued, of course.” Once intended for posterity, the “many notes, set / down in crimped rows to be / legible to a future // are never again read.” Moure works to sensitively resuscitate erased histories.

Fittingly, the book ends in an exultation of meter, rhyme, and word play, with a call to never-ending articulation:

The forks the sea has
tarnished are silver, not tin
We let ourselves outside,
it rains, we go in

In partial abeyance
a jukebox gone still
I’m off passeando
for words where words will

Mastery in poems was
maestria back when
A cut in a finger
lean wolf in a den

Poe, boy in a sandwich
cow lost in the field
If I can wake better
words might to me
                        yield