Voyage to the Center

The poems in Voyage to the Center, by the contemporary Catalan poet Gemma Gorga and lucidly translated by the American poet Sharon Dolin, are extreme acts of compression, which explore the ways a poem may use very few words to convey meaning. Gorga understands both the power and the limits of language; these poems occupy the liminal space between speech and silence. In this her most minimalist style, Gorga's spare, limpid poems rely on image and metaphor, and are often meditations on the process of poetic creation. They invite a reader to slow down and pay attention to the words that shimmer with presence as well as gesture toward the silence and white space of the page. Here, each word has a numinous existence, where even "the grass is on the verge of speaking."