Pilar Quintana lived for nine years on Colombia’s remote Pacific coast, having built her house by hand with her ex-husband on a bluff near the jungle. “Sometimes Colombians do know the area, but, if they do, they know it with a lot of prejudice,” she said in a recent interview. “It’s a poor area, with a large black community.” Racism, violence, class prejudice, misogyny, lack of opportunity – she witnessed and felt how conditions in this isolated region were especially harsh for women. Although the country’s main port, Buenaventura, is located on that coast, the effects of civil war and decades of neglect have exacerbated the area’s poverty. She also observed how the lives of pets, especially of dogs, were precarious: “Pets would get lost, walk out into the wild, get sick. I suffered when they died.”
In her third novel, The Bitch, translated by Lisa Dillman, the life of a woman named Damaris contends with these conditions. Unable to have children with her fisherman husband Rogelio and longing to have an affectionate pet at her side, she adopts a dog and gives it the name she could not give to a daughter — Chirli. Damaris spends her day watching soap operas and maintaining the basics of their life:
“Damaris was engulfed in sadness, and everything – getting out of bed, making lunch, chewing her food – seemed to require a mammoth effort. She felt that life was like the cove and her lot was to walk across it, feet buried in the mud, water up to her waist, alone, totally alone, in a body that bore her no children and was good only for breaking things.”
Although the novel is informed by and reflects the hardships and biases of Colombia’s culture, The Bitch isn’t sociology disguised as a novel. Its tensions are made taut, ever closer to snapping, by Damaris’ reactions to Chirli’s wayward behavior. Quintana could have portrayed Rogelio solely as a domineering, harsh husband, and though their marriage often finds them sleeping apart, Rogelio sometimes seems to show more sense than Damaris. In other words, Quintana doesn’t load the deck in Damaris’ favor, even if Rogelio seems unresponsive to her disquietude.
Quintana pares down her prose to a tale restrained in tone but attuned to the resonance of blunt actions and modest details. The tension builds as Damaris interacts with her community, returns to her dwelling, attempts to live. The past won’t loosen its grip on Damaris; she had been marked by fate, or had felt herself marked, ever since the death of a childhood friend who had been swept to sea while they played: “Nicolasito, slender and white, out on the bluff. ‘Damn that wave for taking him away,’ she said to herself. No, damn her for not stopping him, not preventing it, for standing there without doing anything, even screaming.” And so Chirli becomes the raw element of life that will test her humanity – and her frustrated desire to nurture. But Quintana refuses to invest the relationship with the platitudes of a pet’s loyalty and a pet owner’s gratification:
“’Dog of yours made a mess last night,’ he said.
Damaris grew alarmed, not at whatever it was the dog might have done but at the punishment Rogelio must have given her in Damaris’s absence.
‘What did you do to her?’
‘Me? I didn’t do shit. But she ripped your bras to shreds.’”
[Published by World Editions on August 4, 2020, 128 pages, $14.99 paperback. Nominated for the 2020 National Book Award in Translated Literature]
* * * * *
When I was growing up in Quincy, Massachusetts, there were 34 independent pharmacies in our small city. Some of them also had lunch counters or stocked household staples or drew the neighborhood’s children to a penny candy counter. The last privately owned drugstore closed in 2012. It was owned and run by my childhood friend Audrey who had inherited the business from her father. When she could no longer compete with CVS and Walgreens, she shifted her inventory toward medical equipment while still filling prescriptions. A few months after Audrey’s place shut down, I stood on the sidewalk outside the storefront and peered into the vacated space – the empty magazine rack and slumped wall shelving, ceiling tiles hanging loosely in one corner, the counter tipped on its side, a single crutch leaning against a pile of trash. What exactly was I looking at? I wrote a small entry about the experience in my notebook.
I flashed back to that moment while looking at the 75 images in Mark Hage’s Capital. During 2018-2020, Hage walked through SoHo and other parts of New York City, noticing the closures of storefront businesses. “In prior days,” he observes in his introduction, “an empty store evoked a light curiosity and anticipation for its future. At a larger frequency of closures, there is a different kind of memory at play, closer to dread than nostalgia, a bereavement for a city rapidly becoming something else.”
Remnants, broken fittings, a shard of language, dimmed illumination, the artifacts and rubbish in abandoned spaces, in preparation for “repurposing” – Hage’s eye meditates on these things languishing momentarily before the next occupants not only reoccupy those spaces but seem to collaborate to dictate who shall live and who shall shop in the “something else” that the city is becoming.
“Walking the city, I found myself drawn to these spaces as a refuge,” he writes. “Weary of the guarantees of perpetual design, an insistence that that saturated our lives and displaced meaning. Venturing out again, I find solace in these fleeting compositions that lack intent. Their sculptural logic and painterly rhythms, so at lease, which at some point, in the churn of our resumed ways, will never be seen again.”
Although Hage claims that his images “lack intent,” a sort of speculative goal is suggested – namely, that by pausing to look intently at the remains of what had been grounded and gratifying, we may discover other gratifications in acknowledging what is actually happening. And if, as he says, “perpetual design” no longer makes good on its promise, Hage’s own design sense is exquisite: walls of color or lines or blotches, depths of field extending into unlit edges, snaking wires and interior transom windows, all framed to locate the viewer as the sole observer, the watchperson, watching for the next moves of capital.
[Published by A Public Space Books on October 20, 2020, 128 pages, $18.00]
* * * * *
The Marble Bed, Grace Schulman’s eighth book of poetry, includes six ekphrastic poems on statuary, including a sonnet, “Woman in Sunlight,” and its accompanying photograph of Ernico Pacciani Fornari’s funereal sculpture. Here, a woman “in a gauzy nightdress … in languor” lies asleep atop a crypt’s marble slab. After describing the scene, she swerves to end the poem:
I want to move inside the blackened stone
and find a spark that flares up into blaze
and flashes like sunbeams – to dazzle
with tales of what it could be like to walk
out of my weathered body. Clean. Alive.
The cohabitation of things like “blackened stone” and “sunbeams,” bristling with significance, is a signature of her work. In her essay “May Swenson’s Art of Wonder,” she wrote, “The ambiguities and paradoxes of Swenson’s poetry result from the basic contradiction between our illusion of permanence and our underlying certainty of fatality.” Such “basic contradictions,” and the stubborn insistence to call out and contain them, comprise Schulman’s work. The urge to make the world whole within this art isn’t merely a matter of taking pleasure in pattern-making — since it isn’t the world but our apprehension of it that gathers, sharpens, and ripens through the poems’ rather insistent gestures. From The Marble Bed, this is “Meteor”:
That night the wind-chapped table shouted, new:
peaches, bread, still warm, and consecrated
by watery breezes on the shore
of a town whose very name, Springs,
was a carillon that jangled newness.
Talking of ancient ruins with my new friends,
I allowed the wind to rinse regrets,
lights winking miles across the bay,
noiseless, but for surge of waves,
altar-white, before my feet in sand.
And when we turned off lanterns to look skyward
for the Perseids (it was meteor season),
a comet rode queenly across the sky
before it curved and fell. Seeing myself
a speck in the firmament, I remembered
that rock may burn suddenly, blaze into flame
and spin for centuries before it shines
wanting to be remade. Gray rock. The same
that sparkles with mica flecks by day
when breakers slap it clean. Nothing is new.
Nothing alive cannot be altered.
By her own account, Schulman was mentored by Marianne Moore. In 1971, she completed her dissertation on Moore; fifteen years later it was published as Marianne Moore: The Poet of Engagement (Princeton). In Strange Paradise, her 2018 memoir, Schulman said, “Though my work never emulated her style, I learned about writing from her. Urgency, economy, observation, curiosity. And most of all, joy.” In an essay in First Loves and Other Adventures (2008), Schulman reiterated that for Moore, “to feel passion is to see clearly: Perception affirms the endeavor of the veiled heart, the confounded mind, and the eye that cannot easily see beyond conventional surfaces …” 
Reading Schulman’s poems, I’m never quite sure if her devotion to concretions springs from a wish to close a gap between poet and world (between me and the world) or to open one up and fill it with a bracing insight (between me and a world-mentor). Or perhaps her power comes from insisting on having it both ways. She took what she needed from Moore – as well as from Muriel Rukeyser whose work, like Moore’s, hardly resembles her own. “Poetry depends on the moving relations within itself,” she said of Rukeyser’s poetry. “It is an art that lives in time, expressing and evoking the moving relation between the individual consciousness and the world.” If Moore and Rukeyser expend energy to enact a relationship with the world, Schulman reels the expended energy back into herself and the poem, made whole again after the sensation of breakage. Tikkun olam, “the repair of the world” — there’s joy in that.
And also defiance. The Marble Bed exerts a gorgeous non-compliance against the world’s tendency to proceed toward its own demise. “And I know how it is / to live in gold imagination, not / accept the facts, ever dissatisfied, / to die of thirst here by the fountainside,” she writes in “Ballade for the Duke of Orleans.” She does know. Now 86-years old, she will not relent in her mission; her temperament simply will not allow it. The poem ends,
I’ll take Coltrane’s
prayerful low notes that, falling, rise, like rain
over high waves, and not decide
to die of thirst there by the fountainside.
[Published by Turtle Point Press on October 20, 2020, 136 pages, $18.00 paperback]
For more on Moore and Schulman, see John McIntyre’s essay at the Poetry Foundation.