Patient Zero

“Morín’s new book is one that begs to be read. It is more than engaging, more than new and different.”

Tomás Morín is a writer who understands time. He parcels it, plays with it, takes it down to its microscopic focus, reassembles it and his work sings to it in a way that is distinguished, telling, unique. Because of his penchant for the tiniest details in the editing of his poetry, Morín may spend months on each poem. By the time his poems have collected themselves into a work, that work is something of substance.

For proof of Morín’s expertise in editing, one need not look further than his translation of Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu. That translation will, no doubt, became a hallmark for anyone studying Neruda’s work. So it is not surprising, upon cracking the covers of Morín’s latest book Patient Zero, to find the same detailed aesthetic applied to his own poems, that same microscopic editing of his poetics that elevates each poem found within the collection to a position of mastery.

That Morín chose to dedicate this volume to Philip Levine seems a natural thing to do. Like Levine, Morín is so definitively calculated in his use of language that a reader may become engaged in a kind of self-driven narrative, each poem eliciting its own little elegy for words laid out on the page in such perfect order that they are never likely to be seen in such light again. More than any other reason, that is why a reader must read this book. Look at Morín’s “Saudades,” for example:

When that word, one part swine,
one part invasion, first wobbled into my life
I was eating pastrami and hiding in my office
from students and I know Andrade was in the air,
as was the samba, and how it’s almost impossible
to translate either one, nor should you
unless you’ve been a disciple of the rough grief
that lovingly wraps you in its wings, which is warmer
than one would expect, so much so that it’s easy
to forget for a moment something trivial like pigs
aren’t supposed to fly or that if you say saudades
with enough pain and heart the pigs of your past will come
trotting out of the dark, doing their little sideways dance
around you, shaking their hips to the drum
in your chest until you forget what a frown is
or why we need them and oh they will remind you
how delicious Carnival is, and how glorious
it is to make the past present, and how
easily one can sleep dressed in feathers.

First, look at Morín’s choice of the poem’s title and the way the entire poem pivots around the word saudade and its definition, which the poet gradually introduces in the lines “unless you’ve been a disciple of the rough grief / that lovingly wraps you in its wings, which is warmer / than one would expect.” But he doesn’t stop there. He slowly teases more from the poem’s focus, line by languid line, as he continues: “so much so that it’s easy / to forget for a moment something trivial like pigs /aren’t supposed to fly.”

Here is mastery in its most self-evident existence: the merging of the past with the absurdity of the present until the past becomes elevated to a higher state. The remainder of the poem builds upon the fantastic base of solid lyric Morín has painstakingly established, revealing that saudades are not really something to shake you to your cellular core. Rather, they can be viewed as having a higher purpose:

or that if you say saudades
with enough pain and heart the pigs of your past will come
trotting out of the dark, doing their little sideways dance
around you, shaking their hips to the drum
in your chest until you forget what a frown is
or why we need them and oh they will remind you

And who doesn’t need such reminder? The amazing craft of this poem is that Morín never once tells his reader what to see. Like a deft painter, he uses tiny strokes that let the reader view and engage his or her own sensibility. But what reader will want to refrain from seeing the serendipity of the poem’s conclusion as it flows words like a thick glaze, coating every speck of surrounding substance:

how delicious Carnival is, and how glorious
it is to make the past present, and how
easily one can sleep dressed in feathers.

In examining the minute details Morín has seeded within the poems of Patient Zero, a certain sense of engagement will be required of the reader. But the tricks that the poet has mixed into his magic show of words seem almost self-working, and the reader will be drawn to full engagement in this body of writing, with ease. If not drawn, then compelled. Any reader of poetry will find poems like “Ai,” worthy of compulsion. Within “Ai,” Morín has constructed a delightful approach to elegy—at the very least, a form quite difficult to explore with any sense beyond mourning.

Elegy as poetic discourse is an essential component of a poet’s expression. Yet elegy, without a doubt, presents barriers to its own expression in that it may always be measured as something just a little short of what is needed, for how does one quantify a life and what terms qualify as a whole in the painting of the true value of life, once lost?

Through “Ai,” Morín has stretched the structure of traditional elegy by creating an overview of the life of Ai Ogawa within the outline of the Periodic Table of Elements. To put it another way, the elegiac structure lies within a form of the Periodic Table. To make that possible, he has assigned an atomic weight, an atomic number, a melting point and has meted-out his elaboration of every other aspect normally found in elegy, in the category, “History and Uses.” Is Morín a poet to be reckoned with? Absolutely.

Tomás Morín is a poet engaged in the every day laborious work of poetry. But that is where his tie to run-of-the-mill poetics loses all of its threads. One could say he is an explorer engaging unknown adventure in his practice of poetry, and that description might hit closest to the mark. There is not a portion of Patient Zero that will not lead a reader to some new vistas to view, some unseen, thick-green valleys that lie just beyond what is mapped or to some depth no one has ever dreamed of descending.

Morín’s new book is one that begs to be read. It is more than engaging, more than new and different. Through its pages readers can see the emergence of a master, a poet whose terms are not just defined, they are ones he has crafted from an elemental dust previously unexplored. The bottom line? That Morín is a poet more than worthy of the title: Poet.