Sonora
Sonora holds the resonance of human life facing time itself, and an inevitable finality of voice. Here the voice is that of a feminine lineage; the death faced most centrally is that of the poet’s mother, in a book dedicated to her daughters. Crucially, it includes the sound waves of her native language, the language of both her parents, its history of endurance, as well as the granitic fissures and domes of the place where this language, Galician, is spoken. This lineage cherishes others too, poets who keep Galician alive, and keep Chus Pato alive, even (but we hope not) on the path to planetary extinction: thus poems dedicated to Xabier Cordal, Alba Cid, Manuel Igrexas, Gonzalo Hermo, Oriana Méndez. Sonorous indeed is this voice of a woman who faces the flight of time and the planetary present, so that we too —wherever we live — can face language, place, and future. Pato’s poetry makes all of us more fiercely and humanly alive.
PRAISE FOR SONORA
Chus Pato is a revelation; an immensely powerful poet bringing out absolutely riveting work. Experimental and expansive, her prize-winning Sonora holds Galicia at its very center: its minoritized language, its abounding nature, its rich poetic tradition, its long history of colonization, forced migration, and poverty. Luckily we are in Erín Moure’s deft hands, with not just one, but two outstanding books of poems before us. Reader, do not be fooled by Galician’s minority language status, this is major, major poetry
—Katherine M. Hedeen, translator of Antonio Gamoneda Burn the Losses
Sonora is written in the quiet learning to survive in the face of loss, in a world broken by wars, that prefers the simulacrum and the virtual, and that intelligence be artificial. On a planet breaking climatic and ecosystemic records, where languages go on vanishing with impunity, we are living a human crisis in terms of eco-social existence. This book is a profound reflection on us and on our time.
—Renato Pita Zilbert, Peruvian poet author of El animal muere en los límites de un país conocido
ABOUT THE POET
Chus Pato is a celebrated Galician poet. Six of her twelve books of poetry have been translated from Galician into English, all by Erín Moure, most recently The Face of the Quartzes (Veliz Books, 2021), and her books have also been translated into Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, Portuguese, and Bulgarian. In 2015, she became the first Galician poet to be recorded for the archives of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. Her latest work, Sonora (Xerais, 2023), received the 2024 Spanish National Book Award in poetry and the 2024 Spanish Critics' Prize for poetry in Galician.She has performed throughout Europe, in Mexico and South America, in Canada and the USA, in Cuba, and in North Africa and India. Retired from teaching history and geography, she lives in central Galicia, Spain.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Erín Moure is a Canadian poet and translator (or co-translator) of poetry from French, Galician, Portunhol, Portuguese, and Spanish, and Ukrainian (with Roman Ivashkiv). She has published nineteen books of her own poetry and 30 books of poetry in translation or co-translation. A 40-year retrospective of her work, Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, appeared in 2017 from Wesleyan University Press. Moure has been awarded the Canadian Governor General's Literary Awards in both poetry and translation, and has been three times a finalist for a Best Translated Book Award in poetry. Her latest book is Theophylline: A Poetic Migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop and Grimké (Anansi, 2023). She lives in Montréal.
