THE POETICS OF TRAUMA AND HOPE IN WOUNDED WATER BY ANABEL TORRES

Wounded Water / Agua herida (Bogotá 2004) is a bilingual book of poetry by contemporary Colombian poet Anabel Torres (1948). This book offers a poetic encounter with the trauma or “minute personal shocks» Paul Valery cites when referring to Baudelaire’s poetry. Torres writes of her everyday existence as a woman, as a poet, and as an emigrant living in Europe for the last two decades or more. I contend that Wounded Water/ Agua herida is poetry of survival, similar to what Gregory Orr defines as “transformational lyric poetry”. The semantic field of water in Torres’s poetry conceptualizes a broad spectrum from birth, death, and rebirth.