Poetry as Prose: On Irene Solà's "When I Sing, Mountains Dance"

Irene Solà, transl. Mara Faye Lethem | When I Sing, Mountains Dance | Graywolf Press | 2022 | 216 Pages

Irene Solà’s novel When I Sing, Mountains Dance starts with a storm personified and a person disembodied. Clouds roll over the Pyrenees—“We arrived with full bellies,” they tell us—as a contemplative farmer named Domènec is checking on his cows, collecting wild chanterelles, and hoping “to reel off his verses,” alone and unguarded. The air is charged and menacing but curiously gleeful. The rain pitter-patters, a prosodic drumbeat: “we laughed, huh, huh, huh, huh, as we dampened his head, and our water slunk into his collar.” A calf winds up in wires. Domènec lets go of the mushrooms and raises a knife to cut the animal free. Domènec is a glinting, easy target. Lightning strikes him dead.

This scene exemplifies the casual intimacy between Solà’s poetry and prose. She builds poems of full sentences. She places flesh next to rock, gentle next to rough, in When I Sing, Mountains Dance as she did in her 2017 poetry collection, Beast (Shearsman Books). “Your soft skin / crashes with mine,” begins a one-sentence poem in Beast, “like race trucks, / tectonic plates, / glaciers, / meteorites, / dinosaurs.” She wedges mundane imagery into unexpected pairings. “You stick your nails / under mine,” another one-sentence poem in Beast opens, “Like two roof tiles.”

Solà’s prose unfurls like her poetry, lyrical, playful, and imaginative. When I Sing, Mountains Dance, throws us into the linked stories of fellow mountain dwellers. But time is not linear. Chapters radiate from Domènec’s demise, refracting life both as it was before his death—long before—and as it is after. Solà’s novel is a prism: composite and faceted, scattering slices of multicolored light.

Perspective shifts jarringly. We meet and reencounter Domènec’s wife, Sió, as newborn, bride, and widow. We hear from their son and daughter, Hilari and Mia, snapshotted at various ages. We absorb memories, and lore, through a close-knitted cast of neighbors stretching across generations. The landscape harbors gnarly Macbeth-like witches and darting roe deer, ruminating, chattering. An unnamed tourist from Barcelona revels in all of the colors, textures, and sounds. The chanterelles chime in, too: “There is no pain if the pain is shared. There is no pain if the pain is memory and knowledge and life. There is no pain if you’re a mushroom!” Solà burrows into souls—animal, vegetable, and mineral alike—creating shimmering internal worlds and emphasizing the energy of the environment.

Stories emerge as each of these narrators chips away at the past and the present. The region’s mythology and history mingle with the characters’ gossip and self-revelations. Zooming out, Solà’s unnamed tourist recounts Catalan and Greek versions of how the Pyrenees were named. The myths share contours: a king’s daughter (Pyrene), a conflict, an escape to the mountains, and her violent death there lead to the eponymous tribute. Another chapter presents a different angle—from the mountains’ own vantage point—as Solà intersperses simple line drawings alongside short, impressionistic paragraphs to animate the formation of the Pyrenees’ peaks and crests millennia ago.

Zooming in, by degrees, Solà gives us flickers of the Spanish Civil War. It is the present for a girl in one chapter—a bomb, an amputated leg, Italian planes, Nationals, Republicans. And it has hardened into history for a different girl in another—“boxes and boxes of grenades, pistols, rifles, bullets, mortar, and even bits of machine gun that in the years to come she would stash away.” The blurring of time, of personae, across the same terrain creates a three-dimensional palimpsest. Solà renders the historical and the contemporary in a dizzying blend of tenses, suggesting that what’s past is not just prologue, but also a thrumming undertone; a lingering presence.

Smaller-scale plot points accumulate in the wake of Domènec’s death, orienting the reader along an arc of the human protagonists’ intersecting lives. There’s a childhood hunting accident, a self-imposed exile, and after several narrators rehash these details, we anticipate that there will be a reunion. But—above all—Sió, Hilari, Mia, and the neighbors are vessels for Solà to fill with the cadences of her poetry. Here is Sió, mid-stream of consciousness:

[T]hrow them all away, all the things you’ve ever desired, toss them into the road, into some ditch, the things you used to think. The things you loved. And look how paltry, how measly they were. That man and that mountain. They make a woman want a small life. A runty life like a pretty little pebble. A life that can fit in your pocket. Like a ring, or a hazelnut. They don’t tell a woman she can choose things that aren’t small.

The reader must yield to language, how Solà uses it to calibrate distinct voices, a range of emotions. “The infinite dwells in each of us,” Hilari reflects in a chapter that Solà embeds with a handful of complete poems. “Like a window on the top of our heads that we didn’t even know was there, and that the poet’s voice opens up little by little, and up there, through that crack, is the infinite.”

Cracking, opening, entering like a breeze—this is how Solà’s stories travel, words fluttering. Catch their rhythms; bask in their light.