Chaldea

Divine signs, Eros, lost voices and phantoms, surface without warning and draw the contours of this collection. The title itself is incantatory: Chaldea, comes from the name given to that part of the Sumer region in southern Mesopotamia, then to Babylonia, where Abraham hailed from. This was before the Hebrews crossed the Euphrates to emigrate to Chanaan (present day Syria-Palestine), the biblical name given to the Promised Land.

The fact that he learned ancient Greek, Latin and Medieval Italian, that he spent hours bathing in the flame of Dante, tells us only too little about the author of these fierce and limpid verses – letters written during those secret hours when bonds are forged with friends or with the universe, and where sometimes the most poignant and alive of words, are born.

Son of an island (Ireland) and a peninsula (Italy), Nick Tosches marries the great traditions of Ancient Greece, Rome and Sicily. And with mind and body united, he digs into various wells in order to draw forth and compose his poems. If a simple vision of something can move him, if he remains attached to physical sensations, his wandering through the ages reveals a sharp, agile mind – an intimate geography that reflects his inclination towards everything that burns, everything that is ice.

From the Gospel of Thomas to The Egyptian Book of the Dead, from the great tribe of poets (Hesiod, Horace, Ovid, Dante, Rimbaud, Marlowe, etc.) who describe war and inspire celebration and festivity, he brings back sounds and voices from the Homeric past: brief flashes of beauty he recalls and that give the impression, that one can make the past visible, here in the present, in order to open wide, new horizons. Ezra Pound said it best: " All historical periods are contemporary. "

In what world does the author of Chaldée live, a book that oscillates between the hope of resurrecting through the imagination, all of the archaic fertility rituals, and the sharp consciousness that the world he is trying to resurrect has been irremediably lost, and only exists now through its vestiges, its traces and its ruins? In that space situated somewhere between oral and written language, between exaltation and elegy, immediacy and loss. Discipline of the eye – no less than the ear – plays a non negligible role.

This is where Nick Tosches draws his ability to call upon ancient myths, resurrect " imaginable " gods. At the risk that his reader may no longer be able to distinguish, through this repetition of motifs, between what comes from the past, and what doesn’t, between what " was " and what " is ", the author creates detours through translation or quotations, two processes of identification that demand mimetic virtuosity: imitation of rhyme and meter for the translations, interpretation of voices for the monologues/dialogues/soliloquies. From bliss to damnation (or the other way around) the writer’s gesture is translated, his words exhale a breath that is first soft, then furious and hard, and one that knows intimately, the heart of Man. Anger gives way to appeasement or surrender, after which serenity returns, then harmony, which finally overwhelms everything. And in between… there is dizziness.

Translated by Rob Conrath.