#RivetingReviews: Anna Blasiak reviews BURNING BONES by Miren Agur Meabe

Miren Agur Meabe writes books for adults and children, and is the only writer from the Basque Country to be awarded Spain’s national poetry prize. With several poetry collections, a novel and short stories under her belt, her latest and fifth poetry collection is part of a triptych with the novel A Glass Eye and the short-story collection Burning Bones (both published in English by Parthian). The short stories can definitely be read as prose poems – the heartbeat of a poet is quite evident here.

Among seemingly simple, descriptive sentences, every now and then something quite different shimmers and draws the attention: ‘It’s almost as if rats shape-shift their bodies into smoke when they smell food.’ Or: ‘Taking the palm tree from the house or a crown from a saint amounts to the same thing.’

Miren Agur Meabe writes about quiet worlds with tenderness and attention to detail, in a very sensual, almost synaesthetic way. She describes houses with iron gates, ceramic tiles decorated with geometric patterns, sandstone, wooden balustrades, brass basins, navy pinafores and white socks, crumbling wells and old palm trees whose roots are wreaking havoc on the house next to them. At times, Meabe turns the volume up and suddenly attacks the reader, as when rats and their blood explode from the crown of the palm tree being trimmed or when the swamp-smelling gardener with missing teeth abuses the young protagonist by the well.

The stories are not told in chronological order, they are more like a cubist painting, showing an object simultaneously from different perspectives. But together they form a consistent narrative about the universe of the protagonist, about her relationships with others, about the past and the present.

Reviewed by Anna Blasiak

BURNING BONES

by Miren Agur Meabe

Translated from Basque by Amaia Gabantxo

Published by Parthian (2021)

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Anna Blasiak is a poet, writer, translator, journalist and Managing Editor of the European Literature Network. Recently she translated According to Her by Maciej Hen, published a bilingual poetry and photography book with Lisa Kalloo Café by Wren’s St-James-in-the-Fields, Lunchtime, and a book-length interview with a Holocaust survivor, Lili: Lili Stern-Pohlmann in conversation with Anna Blasiak.

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