Chus Pato – författare

In 2000 in Galicia, in a maelstrom of rupture from her previous poetics, well-known poet Chus Pato gave readers a startling new book that instantly demarcated the literary landscape. This book was a reverberative crescendo, a roar and clamour of genres and fictions for the multipled "I" in a time of unspeakable catastrophes: m-Tala.

There was death and death entered love; writing mutated. Even so, when the poem writes itself, it is loyal only to its own wound; this is its law of gravity. Hordes of Writing, the third book in a projected pentology, "Method", is an essential book from one of the most abysmal, mutant, indispensable and rupturist contemporary European poets.

In Chus Pato's poems, language is a cognitive-emotive artefact, and this in every living sense of the word: explosive. Her language welcomes cognition's pathways, and stylizes history, literature, myths of origin, lineage, friendship, and the realities of nationalism in one huge breath. When her poems foreground elements of Galician culture and reality, these turn out not to be private and enclosed, but elements of our reality too. She explodes forms, explodes the lyric and what lyric possibility is (races it onward in prose poems, invents avatars that bear the place of the I: the she-author, Horda, Brenda, ), engages myth as active in the present tense. In her various works, Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh still exists, cuneiform is readable, Ophelia speaks Galician. In "Charenton", Pato presents the locale of Weiss' Marat/Sade as a play of shadows, light, beauty and intensity that enacts Galician being and the agonies of its history, and of a woman writer in whom this history is chiselled. Its language is lucid, fervent, beautiful: Chus Pato's "Charenton" is not just Galicia, it is Earth, our earth too.