I COULD NOT ASK YOU TO
Helena Fornells Nadal
Edition of 300
136 x 200mm
52 pages
Offset printed in Pantone colour
Foil Cover
Saddle stitched
Softcover
2025
... 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
Edition of 300
136 x 200mm
52 pages
Offset printed in Pantone colour
Foil Cover
Saddle stitched
Softcover
2025
... 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.
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY WINTER PAMPHLET CHOICE 2025
Helena Fornells Nadal’s I Could Not Ask You To is a complex and searching pamphlet, filled with poems held taut by the poet’s charismatic and unique voice. In this work, place – places – are important anchors, and yet slippery still, changing shape as the speaker crosses real and imagined borders. At ‘dreamy Loch Eck,’ we are offered a tether in the land: in the loch as a mirror and in the shape of a half-sunken yacht within the water. But for Fornells Nadal, language thrives as a mode of constant transformation, echoing a changing self and hernew revelations. What was once clear becomes a cloud – ‘a second life returned’ at the ‘wrong time,’ or the stern of a boat dissolving into a stern night.Thus, these poems feel as if they are in a constantly shifting state, where the sea becomes spectral and the lyric ‘I’ disrupts her own striking meditations – on loss, on generational memory, on departure and the resultant intermingling of selves – with sharp and plainly-spoken truths. Clearly and precisely, Fornells Nadal cuts through her constructed figurative worlds to comment on capitalism, on our punishing economy of precarious housing and long working weeks. On the privilege of pursuing art. The effect is an ephemeral push and pull, where remarkable and provocative imagery makes room for its own lyric erosion.
shake you, travelling
too far backwards up to the moment where you open
like a lotus
that has abandoned poetry, looked at it
from the outside, your roots
latched in mud, submerging nightly
into river water, reblooming sparklingly
clean the morning after – loving – me.
(‘Nelumbonaceae’)
Movement is also felt deeply in this collection. The poems themselves are elliptical in form; as readers, we find ourselves at multiple thresholds / crossing temporally and geographically with the speaker as she undergoes seemingly irrevocable change, unable to tread back to what was. ‘Migrating’ Fornells Nadal writes, in one such poem, ‘erased the world.’
— Alycia Pirmohamed, Poetry Book Society Bulletin