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Poetry

As arpas de Iwerddon

By Luz Pozo Garza

About this book

In this new poetry volume, Lua Pozo Garza sings to Ireland, looking at the connections between a poetic and mythological Eire and a real Eire and between a singular and universal Galicia. The poems are a celebration of Atlantic cultures, and and they follow in the tradition of the Galician Renaissance.

The twinning of Ireland and Galicia materialises through the symbols and mystery of poetry, of a language that the archaic classics imagined was a channel to reach the gods and Plato designated as a path for the philosophical knowledge of the truth. This book is a surprising dialogue between the profound and the mundane, between high and low culture, between autobiographical intimacy and the outside world – these are the foundations Luz Pozo Garza uses to construct her poetry.

Book fragment

Winter palaces

And everything was fulfilled during that spring
of sleet in Dublin

I crossed the still furtive light
with a Bible dated in Compostela
and I took it in my lap like a sleeping child
from the motherland

On the clouds
the harmony of light entered dawn

Life was being written on a new page

And I read in our language the Psalms that regulate the alliance
of a Celtic lineage on the two shores
in the church
in that spring of sleet in Dublin

and I read, verse after verse:
Enter with the honour of a princess
in the winter palaces
Do not forget the motherland

Iwerddon harps

And everything was fulfilled like the signs of life
in the pages of autumn there in Dublin

you looked so distant
that there was that fear of losing you in the story of the flood
as your eyes had something -- I don’t know what it was

but now you brought a white camellia in the being
of our motherland
to be planted in the delicate cold of that boreal light
we are so much fascinated by

And I thought:
this daughter will bear a male child
named Kevin Patrick
to be christened at Sutton’s church in the autumn
and everything was fulfilled

That is why I crossed the auras… turbulences
and birds exhausted by winds through
the Pyrenees kept in dissolving snow
The Thames
The Irish Sea and a blue fragment
with a Bible on its lap

it was our Vulgate with burning words
to save the mystery of marriage:
Oh, my daughter, do not forget this kingdom of nostalgia
when you listen to the harps in the temples of Iwerddon
in the Celtic dusk