World Literature Today – July 01, 2019

Direction of Growth

Flowers
hats
fingernails
and doors

grow outward.

If they ever grew inward
earth’s tunnel
would be pierced
with pain.

A pain known by
caves
roots
ears
and women

who have learned how to grow
inward.

Translations from the Catalan

By Sharon Dolin

Gemma Gorga

was born in

Barcelona in

1968, where she

is a professor of

medieval and Renaissance Spanish

literature. Author of six collections

of poetry, her most recent volume is

Mur (2015), which won the Premi de

la Critica de Poesia Catalana.

Sharon Dolin

(sharondolin.

com) is the

author of

six poetry

collections. She received grants

from PEN and the Institut Ramon

Llull for her translation of Gorga’s

prose poems, Book of Minutes

(Field Translation Series/Oberlin

College Press, 2019). She lives in

New York City and directs Writing

About Art in Barcelona each June.

SUMMER READS

Daniel Simon’s Summer Reads

Longing for some poets’ words—perhaps with an activist edge—to accompany him in the

months ahead, Editor in Chief Daniel Simon envisions some quiet, sunny mornings with three

recent books.

Gabeba Baderoon

The History of Intimacy: Poems

Kwela Books

In South African poet Gabeba Baderoon’s fourth collection of poems,

the predominance of English jostles against Afrikaans, Xhosa, Ara-

bic, and such Cape Malay expressions as “Daai is doenya se goete”

(these are only earthly things). This phrase, spoken by Baderoon’s

mother, to whom the book is dedicated, appears in the poem “No Name,” which recounts

the erasure—both legal and cultural—of the author’s Muslim family while growing up on

the Cape in the apartheid era of the 1970s and ’80s. Whether looking at black-and-white

family photos in “Focal Length” or recalling the “ordinary tragedy” of housing discrimina-

tion in “The Flats,” the speaker in Baderoon’s poems lingers on the often-jagged edge of

intimacy, all the while insisting that she belongs “on this earth.”

Billy Bragg

The Three Dimensions of Freedom

Faber Social

From Faber’s description of the book: “In this short and vital

polemic, Billy Bragg argues that to protect ourselves from encroach-

ing tyranny, we must look beyond this one-dimensional notion of

what it means to be free and, by reconnecting liberty to equality

and accountability, restore the individual agency engendered by the

three dimensions of freedom.” Liberty, equality . . . accountability? If anyone can diagnose

“the crisis of accountability in Western democracies” in a novel and interesting way, it must

be Billy Bragg.

C. D. Wright

Casting Deep Shade: An Amble

Inscribed to Beech Trees & Co.

Photographs by Denny Moers

Copper Canyon

In an email, Frank Paino described this book to me: “Though not

overtly a book on climate change, Casting Deep Shade invokes the

magnificence of beech trees as emblematic of all we stand to lose

in our hell-bent lurch toward destruction. Her quirky, memorable poems beg us: Listen.”

In hours of darkness, I often recall one of my favorite lines by the late C. D. Wright (1949–

2016): “draw nearer my dear: never fear: the world spins nightly toward its brightness and

we are on it” (“Crescent”). Some late summer afternoon, I’ll look forward to the “deep

shade” provided by Wright’s posthumous collection.

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