Tesserae - Poetry by Carmen Crespo

BRUSSELS - Sept. 17, 2017 - PRLog -- CARMEN CRESPO (Cáceres, 1962) has published three poetry collections — Tal vez huésped (awarded the II Bal Hotel poetry prize, Devenir, 2014), De música y otras pieles (Polibea, 2015) and Todo ardió luminoso (Amargord, 2016), as well as the long poem márgenes que no (awarded the I Versos al Aire poetry prize in 2015 by Fundación Centro de Poesía José Hierro) and the plaquettes Cuerpo o el corazón del mundo todavía (2014), and Puro hueco (2015). Her poems have been included in anthologies such as Voces nuevas (2012), Poemáticas naturales (2013) and Flores del desierto (2016), and also in literary magazines such as Cuadernos del Matemático, Coloquio de los Perros, Pangea, Tres en Suma and Obituarios. She is an editor on the board of poetry magazine conVersos.

(Original Spanish title: Teselas, translated to English by Amparo Arróspide and Robin Ouzman Hislop)

Notes on Tesserae, extract from a presentation in Enclave bookshop, Madrid, February 25, 2017

Not to embellish, not to use punctuation but letting filter only what is required -- by veiling rhetoric and grammar so that they are noticed only a little although they are much, veiling what is felt, its sense, meaning, directing the attention of the reader towards the signifier and its dispersion. Each tesserae ends unfinished in its syntax, for just as stained glass is cut with a diamond, so is each tesserae.  Some words have been highlighted in italics but why, sacred, tell me pain, you, wave, with what, with whom is the dialogue with what thing with what other words from other times or other texts? Why should we read those words in any other way? As  with the stained glass window (mosaic, collage, farrapeira), those tiny verbal bits do not allow themselves to be completed.

A visitor to a cathedral sits in her pew and serenely contemplates its stained glass windows. So likewise rhythm comes slowly to the reader of TESSERAE, it begs the tranquillity of your gaze to allow its light to filter through. In the tesserae realm of time through duration, the reader writes it through her own body with  pleasure. Reading TESSERAE is to live a time that  endures in memory or soma, which perhaps is the best thing that can happen to a book...

Rock and sand, temple and clay, ruin of yesterday, and all this ruin of ours which the wounds are naming.  Sculpture and body, work and referent, a referent scarcely seen, a  knee, a gaze, the father, what father, whose father, the traveller, the onlooker, a you, an I, a she, who, the one who heals but from what, with light, light from there, light from here, sun light.

~LUZ PICHEL

pienso en    monte fengari    y un resplandor    un resplandor  verde o zinc ceñido sobre la tempestad    rebañando    los puntales las escamas de los últimos barcos que regresan los cuerpos de los    guerreros   que regresan los escudos los cubiles las correas o el calcio doloroso en el bronce de  los peces que     no     que ya     no

i think    mount fengari    and a glow a green or zinc    glow   tightenedover tempest    bathing    mainstays scales of the last ships sailing back bodies of    warriors   sailing back shields scuppers straps or pain ofcalcium inside the bronze of fish who  no longer no more

To order: http://www.lulu.com/shop/carmen-crespo/tesserae/paperback...

Autrhor: http://www.aquillrelle.com/authorcarmen.htm