Book record
Nude
Anne Portugal
Translated from French by Norma Cole
Anne Portugal’s Nude, translated by Norma Cole, has a title so direct that the danger is mistaking it for simplicity. Nude may refer to body, exposure, art object, vulnerability, stripping away, or the grammar of being seen. Portugal’s French poetry is often playful, formally nimble, and resistant to solemn overstatement, and Norma Cole’s translation gives the English a poet’s ear for the shifting surfaces of the line. I would read this book as an investigation of exposure without assuming confession. The nude is not necessarily the self revealed. It may be a pose, a structure, a pressure placed on language. The book’s force likely comes from how it makes bareness complicated, how it lets the poem undress meaning without promising full access.
- Publisher
- Kelsey St. Press
- Language
- French
- Country
- France