Review by Martyn Crucefix of "Slow Burn" by Jordi Doce

The late John Burnside praised Jordi Doce as "one of the three or four living European poets whose work I most treasure." Slow Burn is a sequence of ten delicate, untitled poems of grief, finely translated by Paul O’Prey. It is not till later that the reader is told "death made its move" and Doce initially establishes an unsuspecting mood, comparing the human body to an ordinary "sunlit town square." The café chairs, the old men’s talk, the pigeons, the bell tower, form a "simple / homeostasis," a stability yet to be struck down. Likewise ordinary language (meetings, conversations) only functions up to a point, beyond which hovers "the god / of what’s left unsaid." 

Though distanced into the third person, the fifth poem portrays the writer as he used to be: "rummaging through things, / looking for their meaning." The switch to the present as he "peers through the window" comes as a shock: "He has stopped hearing the voice of himself." Doce’s verbal strikes have an unnerving delicacy. Another poem opens "Whose certainties were these?" and the juxtaposition of certainties with the past tense does powerful lifting in characterising the devastation of loss. The writer’s business is now left in "neglect" and any talk of peace or tranquillity is "to speak a dead language" or is at best "a craving for some plausible / sense of order."

A later poem takes up the earlier suggestion of the unsuspecting ordinary and evokes the shattering effect of grief through the image of a house having lost a room: "We dropped our guard / for just a moment / and it disappeared." It is here that death makes its move, "without / any hint, without any warning. / And took the whole house." The final italicised poem looks back at the sequence preceding it from beneath a sky that is "both itself / and something strange" and affirms that the flames of loss have passed across the flesh of those remaining, for whom, beneath their skin, "embers smoulder on." It is this residual grief that constitutes the mournful "slow burn" of this moving, melancholy, restrained, and exquisitely written chapbook.

About the reviewer
Martyn Crucefix: Between a Drowning Man was published by Salt in 2023; his translations of Peter Huchel (Shearsman) won the 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. A Rilke Selected Poems, Change Your Life, has been published by Pushkin Press, 2024. Martyn's blog is here.