In Sueño del Alma: 22 Andalusian Sonnets, Cat Woodward crafts a luminous tapestry of mystic and metaphysical poetry that captures the fierce, melancholic beauty of Andalusia. This sequence of sonnets explores "The Looking," the act of perceiving as a divine and transformative encounter, weaving a poetic language that evokes the grand, symbolic traditions of Rilke, Lorca, and Valéry. Each poem, steeped in rich, vivid imagery, traverses themes of time, fate, love, and death, inviting readers to experience the cycles of day and night, the masculine and feminine, and the dreams and destinies shaped by this gaze-filled land. The unique form of the Andalusian sonnet underscores the poems’ otherworldly quality—each unrhymed stanza culminating in a resonant couplet, evoking both inevitability and transcendence. This is a work of poetic precision and symbolic depth, a testament to the enduring soul of Andalusia.
Aaron Kent, Broken Sleep Books
Poems from 22 Andalusian Sonnets
From that mauve horizon girdling the visible, perfected
Future washes in, comes rolling up through all its
pandemonious depth, to break upon a coastline
as this present moment’s off-white foam. Starlight,
ploughing its eons straight down, makes a final
flourish and bursts from the tree as a green leaf;
meanwhile, the warmth of night works its designs
on me, transforming suddenly into my sigh. Here,
my thoughts wait, divided from some great arrival,
prickling as if they felt a hand on the other side of
the air. My thoughts, curled close around that dark
lugubrious thing called a heart, feel a fullness melt
them, melt them into unrecognisable emanations,
which fullness then receives with silent ministrations.
Night, count your olives, count what is yours
and allowed to go with you. The dead woman
in the olive orchard stoops to pick up a paper
plate. She has been quietly filling our house
with her smell. Night, give me rest from the
dead woman, her corpse on our table is still
brown with the dirt we threw in after her,
as I watch she wipes her face. Night, let me
not feel the dead woman, whose tongue we
stole when we buried it under a tombstone.
From the door, the dead woman looks out at
me, enraged. Count me among those things
that are made safe in your purse, and so live.
No, not you, you are a black, too bitter olive.