Lupe Gómez, Camouflage (2019)

Lupe Gómez’ Camouflage, translated from Galician by Erín Moure, is a deeply wondrous book. The intensity of the mother is a shape Gómez outlines with a cube of blood, “electric shadow,” and “a new language of white flowers” that “sprang from our hands.” From this mother comes a child, who sleeps “in a mysterious cradle of wood.” In the instant of childbirth, the crackle of vomit, “freshly-pulled” milk and “electromagnetic sparks” fill the shed. Human and animal presences split the face, the life, the memory with unpublishable radiance. It’s not possible, for example, to document the moment when it’s no longer possible to hold the person you love in your own branching arms. As Gómez writes: “We weep, and our tears are not photographs.” As Moure writes: “I didn’t actually plan to translate Camouflage at all. I only wanted to spend time inhabiting these poems I deeply loved, held in a book whose sinews and quiet unity drew me irrevocably and brought me close to my own maternal source.” Yes. These poems changed the shape of my heart, like metallurgy. It’s hard to break the silence, the deep vibration of the book, by writing these words now. But how else to share their “secret energy”: with you?