- Author
- Ellen Bass
- Title
- Indigo
- Translator
- -
- Publisher
- Copper Canyon, 2020
- Info
- 65 pages
Indigo, a poem that titles the latest Ellen Bass’s collection
Indigo is a poem that titles the latest book by Ellen Bass. The poem talks about the pleasure of being alive, as in the verses “I want to have married a man who wanted to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much”. In the same poem, she mentions her inescapable fate of being mortal in a talk with her daughter, making poetic her own presence on this planet, which she decided to mark with a pointed language, almost scientific, disconcerting and full of other adjectives and paradoxes. Death x life. Joy x sorrow. Success x frustration. Youth x Aging.
Indigo, the plant, is one of the figures that illustrate the healthy body of a man who seems to relish every moment of life. On the other hand, the word indigo also represents a shade of intense blue, the color of sensitivity, which stimulates truth, order, and healing. It is the color of the frontal chakra, our third eye, the one that sees everything. If time could be pictured in color, it would certainly be indigo.
Bass captures the plasticity of time, the beauty of the ineffable, something that simply is or could have been true. This book keeps epiphanies in ephemerally eternal verses to be carried on under the arms.
Click here to read the poem Indigo.
Click here to read an article on Ellen Bass by Valentina Meloni.
