Sonora, Chus Pato
Translated by Erín Moure
Veliz Books, 2026
Did
you see her fly?
she
ascends the steps of the labyrinth
right
to the top
where
the planks wobble
where
empty cages lie in heaps
where
the dust and heat are suffocating
or
up to the cone of light shining from the garden
She
lives in that house
and
in that one
and
in the apartment
and
in the others
with the wraiths. (13)
Please let me reside here a little longer in the productive and wild space called not-knowing knowing. And please let me stay here where it’s the body’s knowing that prevails because (because because) the sparked-up heart or the tingling gut or the keen tongue isn’t fussed at all about contradiction and paradox and ambiguity. One hopes a single poem can create such an effect and yet this whole book—this whole sonorous Sonora—acts as a portal to mysteries that cannot easily be said or shared without ourselves (reader-listeners) resorting to new logics of expression.
Sonora is tremendous Galician poet Chus Pato’s latest (12th !) book of poetry and it’s also the winner of both the 2024 National Poetry Prize in Spain and the 2024 Spanish Critics’ Prize for Poetry in Galician. The book is translated by her long-time translator—and fellow astonishing poet—Erín Moure. Importantly, Moure’s own poetry has always understood the book as a world (or worlds), of sorts, in which all physics and ecosystems and experiences within are subject to the love- and play-powered lawlessness of poetry itself. This means that the world of the book—its wild logics—permits of paradox, ambiguity, contradiction, the lateral, the unknown, the feminine, the queer, rather than acting as a container of the linear, the statistical, the macho, the cohered, and the factual. Moure as translator/bringer-overer-into-a-Canadian-English of Pato’s Galician insures that we feel—in our bodies—the granular or (then) granite texture of “the linguistic rock” or “the language rock” (19) of Pato’s world.
So! Sonora. Sonora. Sonora. I know that you can’t hear me speaking aloud the title of this book but I’m doing it… with this Canadian unilingual mouth and—this will be especially hard to prove to you (you are way over there!)—this everyday Canuck mouth (my mouth) that is now made of silica, lagoon water, potato skin, yarn, dirt, bird bones, and asphodels. I’m trying to figure out how poetry—when it communicates as the real-deal stuff—is read more by the stomach or the ear or the fingers or the groin or throat or blood than it is by the brain.
Or I’m not trying to figure it out I’m just trying to stay in the sensation of my body-as-the-mind-that-understands-sounds-and-images-as-truth and then to work up the courage to say it and share it here. Reading César Vallejo has this effect on me and reading Wanda Coleman has this effect on me and reading Pato has this sublime, mysterious effect on me, too: the poems communicate themselves nearly as transfusions—as opposed to static messages—to the heart or mind.
Sonora is comprised of nine waves or nine concentric circles and the force of the book—the singular drop that creates these entrancing soundwaves/gongings—is the death of the poet’s mother. I have a sense, too, from the opening poem, of experiencing each poem as a cascade of images—as if multiple colour slides were overlain in the projector and also as if some of the slides depict deep, European history while others depict more local and immediate moments. The opening poem to Sonora begins with these lines:
There
are images that are dikes between the body
and
the violence of the body
they’re
outside memory
they
extend like the strata of an exemplary life (9)
In this way each poem presents multiple slides or strata or “imaxes” (“images” in Galician) that carries historical and personal time. My body receives the poems as utterances of history and of the autobiographical and yet so laminated are these scenes/sonorities that they arrive as harmonious differences not as discrete units. As a reader I love this experience because the sensation is of listening and seeing multiplicities all-at-once. The opening poem ends this way:
nourished
by roe deer
in
the forests of Brabante /
the
bloodbath happens
To
stand up in the haze
and
go off toward somewhere
interminable
the
law traversed by the signs that are time (9)
Are we in the ancient Sonian forest watching deer move through the oaks and beeches? At the same time are we hallucinating (“beyond memory”) an entire other life as an imagined being that moves into unknowable pockets of time? Sonora produces a kind of magic for the reading body where one is not reading to extract a single statement but rather to enter, again, a radiant world of colour slides-upon-slides.
If the core of the book creates a multi-rayed elegy for the death of Pato’s mother this death is tied to the roots and to the stones and to the waters of history and time, too. As Moure says in her afterword, “The sonority of death, for Pato, is indeed geolinguistic. In her poems, the sonority of mountains, of granitic domes, of meadows and vegetation covering these domes, of the Antela lagoon, of prehistories and histories, is the sonority of being born and weathering time. Only when we are beyond consolation, the poet says, are we born.” (221) One of the magics of a poetry that communes with the body is to integrate the body back into history—to allow the body to feel its presence throughout time. Sonora—in this living English—is an astonishing work and a momentous event: a capturing of waves of both lyrical and far-reaching historical time, and an expression of the elegiac that ever lends the reader hope and giddy ongoingness.
Jake Kennedy—just this morning—saw the paw-prints of mhúyaʔ in the dusty table-top but he did not see mhúyaʔ itself... So the dusty table-top was and must be and is the brief [rain and wind coming] book of the mhúyaʔ. Yes. Thank you!
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