Cosmic Sadness by Jean Portante, translated by Zoe Skoulding
Broken Sleep Books
Cosmic Sadness is a glittering, grief-struck astronomy of the everyday, in which kitchens, scaffolding, train stations and gardens tilt slowly into interstellar space. In Jean Portante's long, linked sequences, memory and matter are always in motion: roses drift above language, migratory birds arrive with their beaks nailed shut, drawers open on months, planets and old parents, while the sky behaves like a flooded cellar or a cracked cinema screen. Born in Luxembourg to an Italian family, Portante writes from a life shaped by migration, multiple mother tongues and seismic histories, from the L'Aquila earthquake to the long aftermath of political violence. His poems are threaded with trains, ladders, scaffolds and fault-lines, but also with a radical tenderness that understands language itself as migratory, full of slips, puns and crossings. In Zoe Skoulding's lucid, attentive English, Cosmic Sadness becomes a planetary conversation. One section, 'Shooting Stars / Library', moves poem by poem through imagined encounters with Whitman, Paz, Celan, Rilke, Dante and many others, tracing a tradition of rupture and re-invention across borders and centuries. Elsewhere, dated fragments and logbook entries track a single summer of eclipses, dead fish, falling stars and returning swallows. This is a book of drawers full of wind and rivers full of ghosts, where every image is a small experiment in how we might live, remember and look up, together, under a changing sky.
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