Still Life with Defeats: Selected Poems

by Tatiana Oroño

Overview

Still Life with Defeats: Selected Poems of Tatiana Oroño is the first English-language collection of Oroño’s poetry. Her poems draw on motherhood, the loses in the Uruguayan dictatorship of the 1980s and, most of all, the natural world. She is a feminist and her poems show a consciousness of her own body, of being a woman in the pain and wonder of the everyday. But most of all, Oroño has a special awareness of language as a body of its own.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945680366
Publisher:	White Pine Press
Publication date:	05/15/2020
Pages:	130
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Tatiana Oroño (San José, Uruguay, 1947) is Uruguayan poet, writer and teacher. She is the author of nine books including Libro de horas (2017), Estuario (2015), La Piedra Nada Sabe (2008), Morada móvil (2004) , El alfabeto verde (1979) and two French editions of her work, Tout fut ce qui ne fut pas/ Todo tuvo la forma que no tuvo (2004), translated by Laura Masello, and Ce qu’il faut dire a des fissures (2012), translated by Madeleine Stratford. Naturaleza muerta con derrotas/ Still Life with Defeats: Selected Poems of Tatiana Oroño is the first English-language collection of Oroño’s poetry. In 2009, Oroño won the Bartolomé Hidalgo Prize in Poetry and the Morosoli Prize for Poetry, two of the most important Uruguayan literary prizes. Her poems have been published in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Chile, El Salvador, Spain, France, and Mexico and, translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval, in literary magazines such as American Poetry Review, Guernica, Ploughshares, Stand, Western Humanities Review, and World Literature Today. Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, fiction writer, memoirist and translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her books include the poetry collection America that island off the coast of France, winner of the Dorset Prize, The Alice Stories, winner of the Prairie Schooner Fiction Book Prize; and the memoir Space, winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association. She was a NEA Translation Fellow. Her translations include The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia, Fable of an Inconsolable Man by Javier Etchevarren, and Reborn in Ink by Laura Cesarco Eglin, co-translated with Catherine Jagoe. She is currently the Zona Gale Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Read an Excerpt

Discounted Here, something has happened Until recently, we were sun and salt of the earth Homo sapiens. Max Scheler. Now we are this: those that are outside the count of 90, 000 dead or disappeared the eyes. the ears. wary.   Still Life with Defeats You must know how to lose and draw near to touch the jellyfish with a sure hand to touch like a fruit the curve of the pain the floral taciturn measure of the defeat in the collective basket of bread and defeats where there is room for the hand the grapes the almonds. What is There is Missing I can’t tell you because what I have to tell is not there, it did not happen. That is what happens when I write. Or better yet: there is a story. One about the shadows of the hands, the heat released when the hand is moving, searching. It is a story outside the facts—like the shadow—is outside the body My task is to find it. That is story.  The Stone Knows Nothing The stone knows nothing burnished by the rain now. Carbonic. Drenched. It knows nothing of the trip. Here, when the winter sun bites the air, it supports a planter full of amaryllis Red flowers that resist the rains wind beneath the ozone skin sickly acid sun / in spite of that name a botanist brushed the stamens and pistils with a friendly hand smooth as the pastoral muse of Góngora/ with leaves like swords my planter full of flowers. The stone supports them. The stone does not know I picked it up in Malvin the beach where my father, Gerardo played with Daniel. Warning There is a hole in the woman’s body at the height of a girth strap, of the abdomen. She throws herself from the bed at four o'clock in the morning because the night gave her a warning. The hole does not sleep. How can a hole go to sleep? It’s not there. The night gave that warning. Like a mother. ……….. the bloodless speech drowns the city leaves the flooded without homes, without offices the eyes of the story the being and the body on foreign territory on the border crossing a false step voice slurred / name blurred (not the brand name of an athletic shoe) self robbed with difficulty poetry can feel its way blindly tracking shoeless in pure pain mute in its wide stain urban / circle of condemned for committing the sin of indigence, the original sin: having been born to a poor mother and father: lineage of the excluded.

Editorial Reviews

In “Elegy for the Road,” Tatiana Orono writes, “Poetry is the place where the things go that have no solution.” Her book, Still Life with Defeats, provides the solution I didn’t know I needed. What gratitude I feel to Jesse Lee Kercheval for this inspired translation. Without it, we’d be bereft of Orono’s taut, compelling poems, rich with sly surprise and haunting imagery. —Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, W. W. Norton Tatiana Oroño’s place amid the motherlines of Uruguayan and Latin American poetry is beyond dispute; in Kercheval’s English translations, Oroño’s svelte lyrics are revealed to be in conversation with a litany of English-language poets writing before and alongside her, from Emily Dickinson to Barbara Guest, Fanny Howe to Cathy Wagner. This is the poetry of cosmic concentration, in which any object, any syllable, no matter how domestic or mundane, becomes a doorway on the Infinite by being so resolutely itself. —Joyelle McSweeney, author of Percussion Grenade Tatiana Oroño's Still Life With Defeats is, like all good poetry, an attempted response to those questions that seem unanswerable. A search for unity underpins these poems, a quest for ultimate meaning, but, as in a still life painting of varied objects, there remains a gulf that cannot be bridged, a chasm that is simultaneously horrifying and beautiful. These poems represent an ongoing movement toward finding the connection and wholeness shared by all living things. Translator Jesse Lee Kercheval has joyfully accompanied the author on this journey; uniting passion with precision, she preserves the dazzling complexity of the original while continuing to ask the questions that have no easy answers. —Jeannine Pitas, translator of I Remember Nightfall by Marosa di Giorgio

From the Publisher