Arc Publications logo

50 years at the cutting edge of poetry publishing

“A meeting point for poets of all latitudes”
— VĂ­ctor Rodríguez Núñez

Review: The Flights of Zarza, by Fernando Kofman

Raymond Humphreys, Roundyhouse 31, 2010

Fernando Koffman has his moments, as with the last four lines of Letter from the Mental Hospital:

He was falling, falling, until waking up,
but when he woke up he was still asleep:
eyes turned inward, brain full of breeze,
contorted, screaming before a mirror.

Similarly on p29, his description of the interior of a cathedral as ...an echo / of wood, marble and resignation is pleasing. But you have to go mining for these pleasures, and all the time you keep tripping over 'Zarza' an androgynous and to my mind pointless construct who appears throughout the book.