I Could Not Ask You To by Helena Fornells Nadal
Mouse Press
Published 29th September 2025.
Helena Fornells Nadal's I COULD NOT ASK YOU TO harnesses the self and its shadow to convey, or rather define, a completely unique way of seeing. Marked by a chatty causality that frequently leads to a sudden assertion - inarguable, deadpan statements - these are exploratory, improvisatory, elegiac poems, at once decisive and tentative, surgically precise and strategically unclear. “Cows. They stand there”, we are reassured, early on, before finding ourselves quickly transported to a moment “where you open / like a lotus / that has abandoned poetry, looked at it / from the outside”. These pieces manage to evoke a double impression of an immediate and vivid reality, and an aerial, abstract perspective. They are attentive to landscape, friendship, loss, memory, the spaciousness and drift of a dream state, of lyric distraction, of consciousness-as-environment - and also how these experiences are intruded upon by the realities of a life “outgrown by weeds / in someone else's muscular garden”. They are concerned, too, with metamorphosis and displacement, with how materials of the exterior are changed by being brought inside; similarly, by the ways in which words and voices change according to context, border crossings, and (linguistic) colonisation. The result of encountering this work is a continuous sharpening of attention and feeling.
Helena Fornells Nadal's I COULD NOT ASK YOU TO harnesses the self and its shadow to convey, or rather define, a completely unique way of seeing. Marked by a chatty causality that frequently leads to a sudden assertion - inarguable, deadpan statements - these are exploratory, improvisatory, elegiac poems, at once decisive and tentative, surgically precise and strategically unclear. “Cows. They stand there”, we are reassured, early on, before finding ourselves quickly transported to a moment “where you open / like a lotus / that has abandoned poetry, looked at it / from the outside”. These pieces manage to evoke a double impression of an immediate and vivid reality, and an aerial, abstract perspective. They are attentive to landscape, friendship, loss, memory, the spaciousness and drift of a dream state, of lyric distraction, of consciousness-as-environment - and also how these experiences are intruded upon by the realities of a life “outgrown by weeds / in someone else's muscular garden”. They are concerned, too, with metamorphosis and displacement, with how materials of the exterior are changed by being brought inside; similarly, by the ways in which words and voices change according to context, border crossings, and (linguistic) colonisation. The result of encountering this work is a continuous sharpening of attention and feeling.
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