Nimrod's Tongue

Robert Merrett was Professor of English at the University of Alberta.

The poems in the four sections of this volume have distinct forms but are equally difficult because of the poet’s sensibility, which joins his native Spanish poetry to a love for the language of Shakespeare. The poet’s English is not that of a native speaker. His sensibility makes him experimental and playful. The first section, which contains a long rambling meditation in prose, evidences this. The poem operates as a kaleidoscope; it repeats words and rearranges phrases in endless strings without clausal structures. The poet focuses on the surfaces of life and on fragmented psychology. His meditation is incantatory and nightmarish; it emphasizes terror and disconnection, employing large, vague circling movements to undermine semantic principles. The second section is experimental with diction and logic. Its poems are abstract and intellectual. Here the poet whimsically reduces philosophical premises. Through the maxim and other spare expressions, he mocks word-forms by exploiting typographical conventions.

The third section contains love poems which to an extent combine the modes of the earlier sections. Theme is much languid and self-dramatizing repetition while the poet praises his woman for making uncertainty real in her own mind. Reality is, for the poet, scientific rather than phenomenal; it is to him a fiction capturable only in jargon and technical terms. Despite this, he loads the woman with sexual, not to say chauvinistic, expectations to try to improve his sense of reality. Here lurks the Latin sensibility of the opening section — namely, a sensuous yet abstract awareness of the physical, a straining for disintegration and fictionality. Besides marvelling at people’s ability to invent reality, the poet sees their gestures as poems. He wishes to undermine substantiality and to celebrate the fictionality of common experience. He emphasizes the permanent and contingent nature of flux. Principle does not explain change; it is only to be observed. Relations between people are subliminal rather than real. This justifies the poet’s tenuous and fearful sense of life, the paradoxical pride he takes in the uncertainty of intimacy. To his relationship with his wife he attributes almost in luxuriating fashion the fictionality of their different points of view. Yet his approach to her body is nervous and sexist. He concentrates so much on sensing it that he ends up fragmenting and doubting his senses. The fourth section contains poems filled with word-play, with the fracturing and coining of words. Theme is the same disjunction of images as in the first section but theme is none of the circling expression. This section is more metaphysical, more sparingly associative and experimental. Some poems are totally disjunctive while others address historical, political, and cosmological topics in rapid, sketchy ways. The poet addresses his adoption of English yet insists that Spanish poets govern his blood and literary memories. This allows him to talk intelligent nonsense, to break down maxims and idioms and to impose upon them invented, fictional linguistic structures. The poems are wildly playful; they are not modulated in English speech rhythms. One might be tempted to conclude that, in his efforts to reconcile Spanish and English poetry, Barreto-Rivera undermines the lyricism of the former and the sense of the latter.