In Chus Pato's poems, language is a cognitive-emotive artefact, and this in every living sense of the word: explosive. Her language welcomes cognition's pathways, and stylizes history, literature, myths of origin, lineage, friendship, and the realities of nationalism in one huge breath. When her poems foreground elements of Galician culture and reality, these turn out not to be private and enclosed, but elements of our reality too. She explodes forms, explodes the lyric and what lyric possibility is (races it onward in prose poems, invents avatars that bear the place of the I: the she-author, Horda, Brenda, ), engages myth as active in the present tense. In her various works, Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh still exists, cuneiform is readable, Ophelia speaks Galician. In "Charenton", Pato presents the locale of Weiss' Marat/Sade as a play of shadows, light, beauty and intensity that enacts Galician being and the agonies of its history, and of a woman writer in whom this history is chiselled. Its language is lucid, fervent, beautiful: Chus Pato's "Charenton" is not just Galicia, it is Earth, our earth too.

Translated by: Erin Moure