Veinte by Vincent Pagé

First translated by W. S. Merwin and now collaged, cut-up and rearranged by Vincent Pagé, the poems from Pablo Neruda’s 1969 collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair form the backbone of this chapbook. While Neruda’s words are borrowed, it is Pagé’s voice that strikes a new nerve through them—via simplicity. Pared down and neatly packaged, the poems never go beyond a handful of lines. Some are imagist, others visual, but most are meant to invoke quiet moments of longing, admiration, and a lasting desire. I do not think a single poem in this collection draws upon feelings of animosity or frustration, all parts of love—rather, despite some sense of sadness when his lover is absent, Pagé’s narrator is at peace.

If you can recall your high school English education, you might already associate anything labeled as a love poem with sonnets or otherwise strictly structured blocks of text that bored you. Though they are all undoubtedly love poems (how could they not be, when drawing source material from Neruda), Pagé’s writing takes love to the abstract. Less explicit, more emotion—poem number VI is more imagist than romantic, in terms of its poetic nature.

smoke twisted over
the pond
like autumn.
you are far off.
hyacinth, leaves, a
bird house –
awe in embers
of memory. i
migrated from the
field to the hills.

Not all are so subtle in feeling. In XV, Pagé writes I hear you in stillness – things emerge / from things; a butterfly, a dream. In a poem about desiring to hear the voice of a distant lover, this is an image that draws direct attention to dwelling on memories, on wishing for the impossible presence of a person too far away to hear. Though Pagé’s narrator never explicitly gives name to the situation between himself and his lover, the poems instead existing as singular instances of feeling, I still felt myself searching for a story. Perhaps it was the way in which the book was arranged—in another form of rearrangment. Crossing out the title (the Spanish word for ‘twenty,’ also a part of the original and much longer title of Neruda’s collection) is a coy step towards the project of the chapbook itself. Pagé also has them arranged as a countdown—the last poem being the first. The carefully structured nature of this chapbook is a love poem in itself, at the risk of sounding sappy.

I was worried for these poems at first, if only because Neruda’s work, when translated into English, carries with it a voice that one might deem old-fashioned. Pagé’s reimagining of Neruda’s works does not reflect that potentially tiring vernacular, however; rather, his poems feel fresh. No drama, no ballads, no grand proclamations of undying love. If anything, these poems can be compared to gentle shower of rain in the evening after a particularly hot day—a reminder that there are always small moments of pleasure to make up for the times when those larger feelings are absent.

Vallum