“in the carbide sadness”: A Review of Antonio Gamoneda’s Book of the Cold by Paul Cunningham

In Book of the Cold, memory burns up like flowers; vertigo stills a reader’s perception as much as it dizzies; and sight-blurring rainfall rages like a sculptor’s hands. Brilliantly translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, Antonio Gamoneda’s Book of the Cold is a breathtaking exercise in synesthesia (“I smell the linseed and shadow”); verbal intensities (“Before the winterscorched vineyards I think of fear and light”); and ecological phantasmagoria (“All the trees have begun to howl within my mind as they / remember your underclothes in the darkness, the light under / your skin, your living petals.”). Fans of Aase Berg’s heavy scenes of clay (“We galloped across the field this empty day as it rained clay and lead and the snow lay half-melted here and there in the flaccid landscape”) and Paul Celan’s compressed yet plentiful lines (“Silence! The thorn drives deeper into your heart: / it is in league with the rose”), will surely appreciate this poet’s radical reconfiguration of nature:

What exactly might Gamoneda mean by the “cold of limits”? According to the translators’ note, after the Spanish Civil War, Gamoneda was “fiercely opposed” to Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and joined a resistance movement in response. It’s no shock that critics haven’t since classified Gamoneda as a poet of the “establishment”. Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez note:

Perhaps this is why Gamoneda’s poetry feels so limitless, especially in learning that he used his father’s poetry (who actually shares his name) to teach himself how to read. Knowing this, an aesthetic limitlessness (or poetics of excess) might be an attempt to move beyond this metaphorical cold—beyond “abyss”:

To lock oneself in Gamoneda’s whitening “prison of cold” is to question that which seems abysmal. To see a darkness in light. To see and be split by a language of corrosive images. Like caustic soda (also known as “lye”), his poems depend on absorptive images and a white deathly atmosphere. White kitchens, white grass. At different times, the color white appears to evoke the “sweetness” of sugar or blood or sex.

Book of the Cold feels like a relentless search for purity. The sickening sweetness of a memory. A loved one’s suicide. A mother’s touch. Early in the collection, the speaker associates a “softness” or “sweetness” with notions of mother. Later, a mother’s flower-like “armpit”. As each poem unfolds, the purity of memory feels like both lye and lie. A purity that increasingly resembles poison and remedy: pharmakon. Memories like sugarcubes. A sublime sweetness.

Slajov Žižek has likened Plato’s pharmakon to a shadowy double, a form of madness. Coincidentally, drunkenness and shadows also frequently haunt Gamoneda’s poetic sequences:

Fatal if swallowed, but also used in the production of soap, Gamoneda’s lyes and lines blend with the natural world, forming steel-cold songs of darkness and light:

What is cold? What is purity? What is light? What is love? Gamoneda’s Book of the Cold asks complex questions and much of the collection feels like a poet’s desperation to move beyond the shadowy, existential coordinates of existence. Move beyond limits! Yet—memories swell like creeping fungal blooms. Rich in natural imagery, one cannot shake the notion of a mother earth turned tragedy. A “carbide sadness”. A song of ceaseless “birdflow” and “ire”:

To enter the Book of the Cold is to enter the wound of an ultimate poetry.