Banyan: Poems - Hardcover

Suarez, Virgil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807127078 ISBN 13: 9780807127070

Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr, 2001

Synopsis

Like the tree of its title, Virgil Suarez's dazzling new sequence of poems sends tendrils of memory and desire deep into the rich soil of a Havana childhood and the post-Revolution Cuban diaspora. Amid the uncertainty and loss of immigrant exile in Florida, where "a father's hand clutches / any dirt it can call its own," the single trunk of the banyan sends branches downward into the earth to become themselves sturdy trunks--fathers and sons, same fibers, same blood.

Incantatory, grounded in lush physical detail, BANYAN evokes the Cuba of history as well as a lost mythic landscape remembered by a son who has "learned this intricate art of leaving, / of saying good-bye to everything home, memories / like fire, a leaver's good-bye to all things irretrievable." Poised between loss and the restless search for identity and rootedness, these memories are sometimes searing but more often allow a son to generate "the music that has saved us all from ruin, / madness, bloodshed, from dying, from bitterness."

One of the first of such poetry collections written in English by Cubans/Cuban Americans living in the United States, BANYAN is an efflorescing testament to the nature of immigration and the quest for a father and a sense of place.

About this title

About the Author:

Virgil Suarez is the author of four previous books of poetry, most recently IN THE REPUBLIC OF LONGING, as well as four novels, a story collection, and two memoirs. He is professor of creative writing at Florida State University.

From Publishers Weekly:

The shadow of the poet's late father looms large in the Cuban-born Suarez's two fall collections. Suarez's mini-memoirs read like a photo album of verse, one which seems instantly familiar. In "Carp," the opening poem of Palm Crows, the poet recalls an afternoon fishing with his late father. The day was "crisp" and the trees offered a "quiet stillness." The poet worries about his aged father. The father catches a fish, but it wriggles free. Life is precious, end of poem: "my father grinned/ because he knew we had shared a moment,/ unlike so many others in our lives. This one,/ like the vulnerability of the carp, hooked/ in his memory, in mine, like some gold coin." The bulk of these poems are similar episodic paeans often accompanied by and ending with a life's lesson. After chronicling the emotional pain felt by the father after a debilitating job-related accident, the poem concludes with the detached observation: "Hard to convince a man who's lost/ his spirit to hang in there." The harsh present-day realities of Cuba appear as "dilapidated buildings/ a poetry of crumbling stone" if not a whitewash, then a look at the brighter side. Curiously, a few poems ("El Despere," "Song to Mango," "Middle Ground") make appearances in both collections. The earnestness of the work is unquestionable, but some readers will be disappointed to find political realities so thoroughly transmuted into familial relations and reflections of childhood. (Banyan: Dec.; Crows: Oct.) Forecast: Suarez is the author of Spared Angola: Memories of a Cuban-American Childhood, a short story collection, three previous poetry collections and four novels, including Havana Thursdays. The accessibility of these poems should make them attractive to After Night Falls fans and others looking for representations of Cuba. Suarez's professorship at the large Florida State University and the readership for his novels should generate further sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0807127078
• ISBN 13: 9780807127070
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 80