Great stones of whitewater hammer down Onto our unhurried walk in the monument's shade, And our cramped bed at the "Vienna Villa" And the gloomy rooms where no one spoke. Great stones of whitewater hammer Onto the statue of a woman made of moon-white wax And the thatchy backwater island with its haunted stretch Of hotel corridor. Great stones of whitewater Smashing what I didn't ask on the lip of the ancient tomb. Smashing what you nevertheless couldn't give. Smashing the little apple tree growing happily in sand Like a souvenir painting. Those red drapes, that weepy guitar. Smashing your hesitation on the shore. Great stones of whitewater hammering, hammering down— Eviscerate me. My soul won't plant itself in this deep black soil, Recoils from eternity, like a thief. No, My soul hangs with all that water, thousands of years' worth Roiling away Up on the edge of that cliff.
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"A bag of dirt in a gallery might be an installation, but I wasn’t quite willing to concede it could also be a poem — a poem must at least, on some level, I thought, be verbal. But was that quite right? What about Aram Saroyan’s famous visual poems, in particular the lowercase m with an extra hump — not even a word or part of a word; an unletter."
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"Take, for example, the 'verdura' rhyming with 'segura' in the Camões, which in the translations I’ve already written appears as verdure, greenery, and lushness depending on what the variation in question most needs. Hatherly does this herself throughout when she uses a range of synonyms, and interestingly also thought of her reinterpretation of traditional texts as an act of translation that has the effect of altering the original."
