Lupe Gómez, Camouflage (2019)

“The sacred as description of experience” wrote Miriam Nichols about Robin Blaser’s work. These words aptly characterize Camouflage, this numinous book of poetry by Lupe Gómez. Forthright and visionary, Gómez conceives a work where poetry is ethics of love and protection, the serious play of small means in which the language of camouflage is political “ inside the political stomach of cows.” Nuanced and knowing, this address to the mother is the address to the Mother, to meaning, “the face of the other” (Levinas). Camouflage the poem, like camouflage the crypsis, conveys the ability to blend into its environment, the ability to be invisible like seawater and corn, where death is a site of action, disturbance. It effects a critique of romanticized versions of rural Galicia. The Galician bagpipers—gaiteiros—represent the region of Galicia, the bagpipe the symbol of a particular communal life. Coeval, the poem transcends Galicia and expands to an amaranthine world. Metaphors are multifarious, alert and alive, where “air is a knife” and “history . . . a knife from inside.” An elegant, gracefully designed bilingual volume, Camouflage is written in Galego, the language of Galicia, the autonomous community in Spain’s northwest, with an outstanding (elastic + spirited + vigilant + heartfelt) translation by the inimitable poet Erín Moure. “The hands of the dew were singing hip hop.”