PAULINE STAINER
Pauline Stainer es una poeta inglesa, nacida en Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent. Después de asistir al Santa Ana College, Oxford, se trasladó a Essex, donde crió a cuatro hijos. Tras varios años en la isla de Orkney de Rousay, se trasladó a Suffolk, donde vive ahora. Desde la publicación de su primer libro de poemas, The Honeycomb (1989), ha publicado 7 colecciones completas adicionales, incluyendo The Wound-Dresser's Dream (1996), por la que fue nominada para el Premio de Poesía Whitbread, The Lady and the Hare: New and Selected Poems (2003), y su último volumen, Tiger Facing the Mist (2013). Ha sido galardonada con numerosos premios y becas, entre ellos el King's Lynn Award for Merit in Poetry, a Cholmondeley Award and a Hawthornden fellowship, y fue seleccionada para Poetry Book Society's New Generation Poets promotion in 1994. Es también artista.
CON LA VISIÓN DEL BARCO DE ESCLAVOS
Llegamos a latitudes nunca contempladas -
la visión del barco de esclavos
durante el servicio divino
en la cubierta.
En tempranos días de perro,
hemos cavado
entre bosques de sándalo,
cogiendo, de un salto, halcones y sulfuro.
Lo que nos perseguía, después,
no era el frío conceder
de un sacramento
en las ardientes depresiones
sino algo más exótico-
aquella sensación
de un barco de carga, ligero,
tras la llegada de la calma.
Traducciones de Carlos León Liquete
http://www.lapaginadenadie.com/
XOCHIQUETZAL
Los bomberos de Chernobyl
yacen desnudos
sobre inclinadas camas
en cuartos estériles,
sin pestañas
ni glándulas salivales
Oh muerte
llévalos levemente
como la diosa colombiana
que hace el amor
a los jóvenes guerreros
en el campo de batalla
sosteniendo una mariposa
entre sus labios.
http://inutilesmisterios.blogspot.com.es/
Conjuration
Men conjured Blodeuwedd
from tapers of meadowsweet
Orpheus evoked Eurydice
on the body of the lyre
astronomers, tracking Pluto,
see Persephone
with mourning-jet
at the opiate of her throat
Alcestis wakes – such sugars
work the cist-grave
and Lazarus?
To what voltage
will the five wits lodge
in their living dead?
DROVERS
They came down holloways
between blue sloes.
I have come to know
that register of blue-darks
juniper berries deepening
through woodsmoke
the pungency of bruised herbs
at dusk
slow-burn
of driven beasts
blue intake of breath
at pasture beyond.
From: Crossing the Snowline
AFTER THE ARK
'How does water remain so unfamiliar?'
Roni Horn
It’s not told
how the animals left,
but waiting to disembark
their breath formed a cloud
and fell as light rain.
It gathered in hollows
under their eyes,
the peaceable kingdom
laid down, like memory
in a library of water
and long after landing
they would watch
for the waterspouts
and that mysterious fall
of fish from the air.
From: Crossing the Snowline
THE RAVEN MASTER
Young ravens
in the White Tower,
cross-lit, conspirational.
He is teaching them to talk –
calls them
an unkindness of seven
as if remembering
their prophetic tongues
leading wolves to prey
the deer stepping
through tall blue mist
to water unseen
the speech of birds
picking memory clean.
From: Crossing the Snowline
THE BLESSING
for Peter Johnson
There they were –
ordinary, unknowable,
beasts waiting to be blessed
at St. Luke in the Fields
some trying to break cover
as if they hear
the whizz of the biblical wind
in the mulberry trees
others, domesticated,
raising their symphony
for wild instruments
under the verve of prayer.
Over the Hudson River
the cloud puts out a paw,
skyscrapers stretch
with the heat
the bees of the invisible
are bleached in sunlight,
If anyone is in Christ
he is a new creature.
Nothing is like
the anxiety of animals
waiting for Adam
to name them
yet some lie down
in the enclosed garden
as if the tree of charity
sprang from their breasts.
From: Crossing the Snowline
HIEROGLYPH
The moon is pale
as a hare’s belly
so what trembles
the alert stillness
of this Egyptian hare
over a ripple of water
into running script?
From: Crossing the Snowline
CROSSING THE SNOW-LINE
I still see them –
the sculptors of Kilpeck
on the road
to Santiago de Compostela,
crossing the Roman bridge
in the small hours
westward,
always westward,
Finisterre referring
its azure,
the jubilation of wolves
spilling into the cloister.
But some
never made it back
through the wilderness
to chisel
a sleeping Christ
from the living tree
and lie fallow
under their larch ceiling
as if amazed
by the irrepressible light
at the burial of the stars.
From: Crossing the Snowline
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