BETWEEN FISH SCALES

In her English-language debut, Basque poet Leire Bilbao gives us a visceral view of motherhood, worklife, and plural desire in a maritime landscape, both hyper-real and eerily anthropomorphic. Carrying the melodies of her early, bardic work as a bertsolari (singer of improvised Basque verse), and a lived knowledge of local fishing traditions, Bilbao weaves a net of unfamiliar language that trawls the depths of femininity. She can turn a mother into a mollusk, an eye into a buoy, and a newborn into a thief in the span of a moment. This selection from several of Bilbao’s books, with an afterword by Basque scholar Leire Erviti, makes her work available for the first time to English-language readers, and marks Basque-UK poet Joana Urtasun’s first book as a translator.

Leire Bilbao’s poems prick me from the page, as if spearing an unknown organ. They set the bodies we are—and those we come from—inside a shifting, watery landscape, an amniotic sea. Surreal, elemental images gather in their nets, returning us “to the mother, the home, the tongue that made us.” These poems trawl daily life for moments of desire, violence, and creation, arranging and transforming them into small, intimate worlds of magic and terror. Joana Urtasun’s luminous translation from the Basque feels like a duet, a conversation, a homecoming. —Emily Skillings

I loved reading Basque poet Leire Bilbao’s playful, shapeshifting verse. This is a book of small, strange miracles, in which decidedly feminine acts of transformation refresh the understanding with odd figures and bold simplicity: “A mother is a place / of crossing. / A door for another.” Joana Urtasun’s keen introduction and translations honor the elemental, gnomic poems of Between Fish Scales with a dynamic understanding far superior to mere accuracy. —Katie Peterson

If Sharon Olds dreamed in Basque, her dreams might sound like Leire Bilbao. —Kirmen Uribe

Leire Bilbao’s poems, in Joana Urtasun’s English, are cadenced flows from a fluid economy of birth, motherhood, water and blood, of food from the oven and smells of sea. They net us deep in a rural coastal culture of Euskal Herria, in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, a culture and upbringing close to fish and rocks and water. Urtasun gives us a work limpid and vivid (echoes strongly, for me, Lupe Gómez’s land-based Galician culture, just to the west), attuned to her own ear, that touches our shared human experience of becoming, community, endurance. —Erín Moure