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.