I Could Not Ask You To

by Helena Fornells Nadal

Mouse Press

Softcover, 2025

52 pages

... those in the hot dark room
are alive in – in frames
Paper people of the oppressed
language

                               (from 'Shadow's Shadow')

Helena Fornells Nadal's I COULD NOT ASK YOU TO harnesses the self and its shadow to convey, or rather define, a completely unique way of seeing. Marked by a chatty causality that frequently leads to a sudden assertion - inarguable, deadpan statements - these are exploratory, improvisatory, elegiac poems, at once decisive and tentative, surgically precise and strategically unclear. ‘Cows. They stand there’, we are reassured, early on, before finding ourselves quickly transported to a moment ‘where you open / like a lotus / that has abandoned poetry, looked at it / from the outside’.

These pieces manage to evoke a double impression of an immediate and vivid reality, and an aerial, abstract perspective. They are attentive to landscape, friendship, loss, memory, the spaciousness and drift of a dream state, of lyric distraction, of consciousness-as-environment – and also how these experiences are intruded upon by the realities of a life ‘outgrown by weeds / in someone else’s muscular garden’. They are concerned, too, with metamorphosis and displacement, with how materials of the exterior are changed by being brought inside; similarly, by the ways in which words and voices change according to context, border crossings, (linguistic) colonisation. The result of encountering this work is a continuous sharpening of attention and feeling.

Helena Fornells Nadal is a Catalan poet based in Edinburgh. She is currently engaged in research on the intersection between land politics and ecopoetics. Her work has appeared in publications including DATABLEED, Magma, Gutter, New Writing Scotland, PROTOTYPE 6 and Propel.