Ivón Gordon Vailakis
Poetry
Critics
From Ivón’s previous work, Colibríes en el exilio (El Conejo Press, 1997), we know her as a poet whose language is evocative and synaesthetic; around her words linger the scents and textures of food and nourishment.
This food is as pleasurable and indulgent as “caramel cream and quince”; it is as comforting and familiar as “lemon verbena scent”; it is the talisman as “saffron in my pocket” and it is the acid of exile: “a bitter orange.”
It is this last, bittersweet memory, which bridges the two collections.
In Manzanilla del insomnio (El Conejo Press, 2002) readers uncover, as if secretly, the recurring leit-motif of diaspora where “the rites of Rosh Hashanah [are]/ written under a napkin.”
Silently, in “morsels of dreams”, the repercussions of history and cultural fragmentation are mediated through memory.
She tells us, “Gravestones don’t lie/ about languages learned / their secrets/ are already buried underground.”
But at the heart of her poems is an intimate relationship with the body that carries these memories and traverses the cartography of exile.
Her language bends around, sticks to, and sometimes punctuates the bodies undergoing the often painful, at times erotic, ritual of memory; words meet the body when they waft as the familiar scent of “spicy chile thickened with suffering”, when they leave the residue of “mango” and “fig molasses”, and when they are held back—a child’s hopeful finger trapped under memory’s foot.
Ivón’s poems carry all of these sensations—if only fleetingly—and we remember her poetry as the memory of a smell, the trace of a touch, or the sensation left on a tongue.
Cara Cardinale, University of California, Riverside
