Synopsis
In his sixth collection, American Book Award winner Martin Espada has created a poetic mural. There are conquerors, slaves, and rebels from Caribbean history; the "Mayan astronomer" calmly smoking a cigarette in the middle of a New York tenement fire; a nun staging a White House vigil to protest her torture; a man on death row mourning the loss of his books; and even Carmen Miranda.
Reviews
Espada, a frequent contributor to National Public Radio's various news programs, can keep his magic-inflected tone light even when engaging social disparity: "As I was about/ to put a quarter/ in the parking meter,/ a man walking by/ stopped, whirled,/ fired three karate kicks/ decapitating the meter,/ and stretched out/ his hand/ for the quarter." A former tenant lawyer, Espada makes a convincing Robin Hood both in the poem cursing a "Jim Crow Mexican Restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts Where My Cousin Esteban Was Forbidden to Wait Tables Because He Wears Dreadlocks" and in "The Governor of Puerto Rico Reveals at His Inaugural That He Is the Reincarnation of Ponce de Leon." While these poems make a scene defying their overly deterministic titles, it's the quiet and quick ones that make his sixth collection solid, like the title poem, about a man on a fire escape who stops to smoke a cigarette, or "The Mexican Cabdriver's Poem for His Wife, Who Has Left Him", in which the speaker, having challenged the poets in his cab to write the poem at hand, supplies the somehow heartbreaking information that his wife isn't like the moon but "is like the bridge/ when there is so much traffic/ I have time/ to watch the boats/ on the river." The book ends with a suite of unsatisfying poems about the executions of American political prisoners, but the overall effect of this book is one of poetic uplift in the face of everyday oppression. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Political verse has a bad name, but on the other hand, much good poetry is openly political. Espada's sixth collection is as open as Carl Sandburg, Muriel Rukeyser, or Carolyn Kizer in demonstration trim. Espada is Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican and stands in solidarity with other Latin Americans, and with historic American Indians, African American death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jumal, and Jewish Communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, too. So Espada's politics are ethnic and, at a deeper level that inspires deeper poetry, such as the poems dealing with his grandmother's death, familial rather than ideological. The center plank of Espada's platform, so to speak, is human dignity, which he concedes, especially powerfully in "The River Will Not Testify," on a seventeenth-century Indian massacre by Puritans, is fleeting, but which is probably the most important "cause" for each person while he or she lives. Unsentimental, realistic work that almost never sounds a contestable note. Ray Olson
American-born Puerto Rican poet Espada, son of a political activist and at one time a practicing lawyer, has spent his life involved in social justice work on behalf of the Hispanic community. His poems speak eloquently of issues that cut to the core of human existence--death, tumors, heart disease, poverty--and to individuals who suffer inhumane treatment (and worse) owing to political oppression (e.g., Sister Dianna Ortiz, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg). From the enigmatic title poem (from a third-floor window, a man watches the restaurant below him burn, seemingly unaware or immune to the danger he's in) through pieces about the death of his grandmother, Puerto Rico, his wife's family, Carmen Miranda, and more, Espada employs a variety of styles--sometimes long-lined, sometimes brief as haiku. In a richly descriptive, highly political poem for death row prisoner/poet Mumia Abu-Jamal (commissioned by NPR's "All Things Considered," which later refused to air it), he writes, "The executioner's needle would flush the poison/ down into Mumia's writing hand/ so the fingers curl like a burned spider." A glossary translates terms that may be unfamiliar to the reader. Highly recommended.
-Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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