Nights That Make the Night: Selected Poems of Vicent Andres Estelles

Estelles introduces his muse as the ``immortal beloved . . . inexorable goddess''--the statuesque beauty all too recognizable in a thousand other poems. Then, slyly subverting worn-out convention, he dumps her in a forest where suddenly she begins ``growing in soft / steady rain.'' But she cannot fulfill a terrestrial life's promise of fecundity, achieving instead only a kinship with ``trees / that fruitlessly grow.'' Throughout this Catalan poet's work--first appearing in English here via renowned translator Rosenthal--the ``formal and refined . . . cracks up, comes apart'' only to become ``an everyday pile, vaguely adorable.'' The failure of a meaningful transposition of the high and the timeless into the mundane results in a bitter sense of belatedness. The stately guest of ``The Paris Hotel'' spends his days awaiting a mysterious phone call, which comes when he descends ``the stairs, / feet first, on four men's shoulders.'' Given Estelles's remorseful, past-haunted sensibility, Rosenthal's claim in his introduction that Estelles inspired a poetic awakening in Catalan seems ironic. Yet the poems at the volume's end--presumably Estelles's later work, though the reader is not given the assistance of dates--do reveal a strength and simplicity rooted in the Catalan landscape. (Apr.)