By AFRANIO CATANI*
Commentary on Laura Erber's book of poems
“I write with what you do to me\ When we do nothing”
Laura Erber, from Rio de Janeiro, now lives in The Hague, Netherlands, and, in addition to writing fiction, she has written essays, texts for children and occasional translations – she translated Anne Carson (1950). She is the author of excellent books of poems, such as The bodies and the days (2008) A returned (2016) Sugar and tobacco inspection table (2018) and Theadoro Theodor (2018), in addition to the essays contained in The unproductive artist (2021)
This XNUMXth-century The exchanged words, which brings together 19 poems and an Afterword by Marcos Siscar, begins with a dedication that already suggests the ambiguity of exchange as sharing or mistake: “The poems were all yours. Now it is the book of silence”.
Laura Erber blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose. The first three and the fifth texts are written in prose, while the other fifteen are in verse. Luisa Destri points out that “there is a fragmentary effect caused by the collection of images that pass through universes as distant as turtles and barricades, card games and pop art throughout the book.”
Marcos Siscar understands that “words are the object of exchange, the evidence that there would be sharing. But in this language, the nature of sharing and its conditions are also at stake” – and sharing appears exposed “to the possibility of disagreement, error, manipulation”.
In “Five minutes” the poet writes that “I will be (…) a lizard absorbing all the light of these regions in the five minutes that were granted to me” and “I disappear suddenly – you will forgive me for this one day – like a friendly light that sneaked in through the balcony with the whistle of the flying leaves of a flamboyant tree”.
For her, “the days end before tiredness” and “no one can undo those two (…) Neither can they contain themselves nor fit into the game they played” (“Card Players”).
“Restos” associates the museum fire with uncertainties in love: “from the charred national museum/carried by the wind/the scattered past/like lost letters/of what never ends/throughout the city/so too/the two of us/little pieces of reality/set on fire/with the wind/we arrived/here/the rest we know/and we don’t know”.
“Back” and “Circumstances of Light” deal with lassitude, the almost immutability of situations: “I know the salt of slow days”; “through ineptitude/difficulty/or calculation/things change/very slowly”.
In “I don’t know how to get rid of words” tenderness prevails – “a landscape is what doesn’t close (…) your fingers run across the red sky/mine stay still on your hair/forever” –, while in “Atravessamos”, “small reflections on the water blind, fill with the future/shining the mouth with laughter”.
There is even more tenderness in 'we have barely begun to fly': “we will meet, we will embrace each other so much/like someone who arrives from a trip/at the port/after sailing around the world/in a caravel…/look how the sail/only trembles in the breeze”.
In the prose poem “Véspera”, the theme of love emerges with the delicacy that characterizes the odes produced by Laura Erber: “The more or less complete recognition that everything is as it is. Between us, I mean. Is it possible to know the ground we walk on while we walk on this ground? The question is not false, but the voice that sustains it belongs to no one. Do you understand? An ideal library would be made up of poems that slide between the simplest actions and the dialect of the steam that comes out of the coffee. Always hot. Because that’s how it is. More or less like sustaining your voice in the air when your feet lose the ground. What do I mean? You understand me when I say that we were invited to exist here”.
The exchanged words have two epigraphs that complement each other, one by Anne Carson (“The animal that trots/can restore the red/of red hearts”) and one by Hilda Hilst (“Glued to your mouth my disorder”). Both set the tone in Laura Erber’s poems, in an intense dialogue with the reader. In the apt expression of Marcos Siscar, “words are exchanged, but they also kill”, because for Laura, the risk is that we remain like “flocks of birds/trapped in the spotlight”.
*Afranio Catani He is a retired senior professor at the Faculty of Education of USP. He is currently a visiting professor at the Faculty of Education of UERJ (Duque de Caxias campus).
Reference
Laura Erber. The exchanged words. Belo Horizonte: Âyiné Publishing, 2023, 64 pages. [https://amzn.to/4gi5n9f]
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