Deseos/Longings/J'aimerais tant
Gustavo Gac-Artigas
In the act of being articulated, desire both deepens and diminishes. In Deseos/ Longings/ J’aimerais tant, Chilean writer Gustavo Gac-Artigas captures the nuances of this paradox in poems of searing emotional clarity. When fully lived, his poems insist, life is concurrently elegy and ode, a love song made more urgent and ardent by its underlying ephemerality. In these twenty-nine poems rendered in three languages (Spanish, French, and English) that amplify the echoes of ‘longing’ and its lyrical polyphony, Gac-Artigas gives voice to life’s submersions, tempests and shipwrecks, but above all to redeeming love and its arsenal of surprises. “I don’t know why I fell in love/and maybe that’s why/I’m still in love,” the speaker confesses in one of the many poems about the beloved, summoning us to see mystery as a gift, a force perhaps akin to that at work in duende. At the same time, if to love is to know “the master and the beggar,” “the torturer/and the tortured,” then to love is to know torment. “I knew the hands of rage,” the poet writes, “and rage gentled my hands.” |
An opening sequence that sets the collection’s meditative tone with the “how I long”/ “how I wish” refrain underscores the human desire for the impossible or near-impossible, whether in the form of excising one’s fears or being granted “strength to crush the tyrant,” or as a wish to be “foam/to shelter the dead/who lie at the bottom of the sea.” However, these are not poems of lament or crippling nostalgia, but rather homages to our ravenous capacity to love, regret, and re-learn how to navigate a world that remains, for now, fragrant and spiced with cinnamon, saffron, cloves, and boldo leaves.
A border-crosser of many kinds –including geopolitical, linguistic, cultural—Gac-Artigas gives us, in Deseos/ Longings/ J’aimerais tant, what Milan Kundera might call “a moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.” In his invocation to humanity, he pleads, “anchor my vagabond mind/to the desecrated word” “and let my dreams survive in yours,” and this collection enables exactly that.
A border-crosser of many kinds –including geopolitical, linguistic, cultural—Gac-Artigas gives us, in Deseos/ Longings/ J’aimerais tant, what Milan Kundera might call “a moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.” In his invocation to humanity, he pleads, “anchor my vagabond mind/to the desecrated word” “and let my dreams survive in yours,” and this collection enables exactly that.
Gustavo Gac-Artigas: Writer, poet and playwright from Chile. His poetry has been featured in Multicultural Echoes (CSU-Chico), Enclave, (CUNY), RANLE, Fonoteca de poesía, Revista Kametsa, and in several anthologies. He is a Corresponding Member of the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (ANLE). Work in progress: poetry collection, hombre de américa/man of America.
Deseos/Longings/J’aimerais tant is a publication by Ediciones Nuevo Espacio. Click here to purchase.
Deseos/Longings/J’aimerais tant is a publication by Ediciones Nuevo Espacio. Click here to purchase.
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