Edinburgh Notebook

by Valerie Mejer Caso, Michelle Gil-Montero (Translation)

A book-length epitaph for her late brother Charlie, Valerie Mejer Caso’s Edinburgh Notebook is a captivating, startling expression of grief. Following a trail of breadcrumbs, Mejer Caso’s poems shift between memories, cities, philosophies, echoes and landscapes of quicksand, oceans, deserts, apocalypse. Featuring photographs by Barry Shapiro, Edinburgh Notebook contains a profound archive of cultural history coursing with elliptical, illuminating poems. “Even without being / you are what exists and what does not exist, / the looming night.”

Genres: Poetry

158 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2021

Reviews

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a thrilling work, hybridized with prose elements, photographs, and more standard lyric poems. I found myself aching to be in the landscapes Mejer Caso was expositing. And further found myself enraptured by the stars she allowed us to hold.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

In turns surreal, visceral, gorgeous and painful—Edinburgh Notebook is a fractured elegy for the poet's brother, who we learn died by suicide. It reads as a meditation on loss and memory, one that experiments with modes and tones across six sometimes disparate sections. Some use unbroken paragraphs of text; others incorporate full-color artwork or black-and-white photography.

I read this slowly, as the imagery can be dense and the subject matter is heavy, but it's not particularly hard to read or parse. There's a lot here—presented in bilingual format, you get about 150 pages to peruse, and I found myself reflecting on the lines in Spanish more than I usually do with bilingual collections. My Spanish is rusty, but the translation feels incredibly sharp. Every translation incorporates an aspect of the translator: here, it's clear Michelle Gil-Montero has a finely tuned ear and the insight to capture the pain and precision of the original text. Lines sing from the page. The texture and emotion of the original poems are palpable.

All told, it's another excellent collection from Action Books. Highly recommended.

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Locally unpredictable with a prehuman freezeframe warmth, Valerie Mejer Caso’s Edinburgh Notebook, as silently translated to vividity by Michelle Gil-Montero, and as unseen from below by photographer Barry Shapiro, is a work of angel bandages and spirit health that is transported and stilled by that ghost vein of connection that puts a body to our ways of being elsewhere. It’ll bring you to the knees of another. I think there is a car accident. I think there is a shadow that would burn itself fatherless on its sunbathing mother. I think there was and then I think there wasn’t. Mejer Caso catches time yawning.