09-4-0370

De los Santos, Marisa. From the Bones Out. Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2000. 90 pp. ISBN 1-57003-322-6, $15.95 (cl); 1-57003-323-4, $9.95 (pb).

This collection of poems expresses the sensual experience of the physical world as the embodiment of the heart’s desire. These poems are stories and portraits that reflect intimate, sensuous connections with particular places and with the rhythms and cycles of the natural world. De los Santos writes of love and longing, relationships and the passage of time, grief and regeneration. Many of the poems deal with death—of a father, a niece, a grandmother, an unknown boy from another time, a jazz singer—reflecting a preoccupation with mortality, the obsessions, pleasures, and limitations of the flesh and their connection with the spirit.

Are art, music, and poetry the pulse that connects the world of the flesh with the world of the spirit? Or are these art forms only the conductor? De los Santos’s language is lush and luscious, thick and heavy, each moment laden with portent, making the ethereal corporeal; still, she is lyrical and moving. Her voluptuous imagery is often elegantly contained by meticulously metered forms: villanelles, couplets, triplets, and quatrains, rhymed and unrhymed. The conversational cadences of her exquisitely worded stanzas reflect a nuanced mastery of metaphor in gorgeous language suffused with heat and light, memory and desire.

—Lori Tsang
Washington, D.C.

09-4-0371

González, Ray. Turtle Pictures. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2000. 178 pp. ISBN 0-8165-1964-1, $29.95 (cl); 0-8165-1966-8, $16.95 (pb).

Herrera, Juan Felipe. Thunderweavers/ Tejedoras de rayos. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2000. 74 pp. Bilingual (English-Spanish) ed. ISBN 0-8165-1986-2, $17.95 (pb).

The University of Arizona once again deserves high praise for its Camino del Sol Latina and Latino Literary Series. Both of these recent publications in the series deserve all the praise they are sure to get. González and Herrera, prolific and talented Mexican-American scholars, editors, and writers of poetry and prose for children and adults, continue to explore and develop concerns from previous books.

González’s Turtle Pictures, a memoir in prose and poetry, has echoes of his earlier work, Memory Fever. Using the turtle as a symbol, ancient and modern, enduring and eternal, of the Mexican people, González traces their cultural journey from Mayan and Aztec origins through the arrival of Cortez and eventually north to El Paso, Texas, and beyond. González offers a broad sweep of history and geography but also a detailed look at specific events and people.

Part I, "First Shell," contains a wealth of passages to contemplate; Part II, "Chicano Tortuga Party," with its tongue-in-cheek religious overtones, is rich with bittersweet wit; but Part IV, "Tortuga Borders," contains the most powerful and moving images in the book. Here, the people’s desperate desire to cross the Rio Grande parallels the turtles’ unrelenting drive to migrate. González’s water imagery provides a language bath in which every word is perfectly chosen and placed. The text is multilayered, and the reader must dive beneath the surface to wring deepest meaning from these sometimes meditative, often surrealistic lyrics.

Herrera’s Thunderweavers/Tejedoras de rayos deviates from the standard side-by-side bilingual text. One cover and one half of the book are in English; flip it over and the other half is in Spanish. One reads into the book, into the heart of the matter. Thunderweavers is a natural, if heartbreaking, continuation of Herrera’s earlier Mayan Drifter. Rather than a historical overview, Thunderweavers focuses on a specific incident in 1997 when paramilitary forces massacred Mayan villagers in Acteal, Chiapas. The story of death, loss, and displacement is told from the perspectives of four family members: Maruch, a grandmother; Pascuala, her daughter; and her two granddaughters, Xunka, who is 12 years old and is lost, and Makal, who is pregnant. Herrera weaves the voices and cries of these women together to tell a tale of physical, psychological, and emotional trauma.

The simple, enduring ebb and flow of village life is suggested by recurring images of agrarian domesticity, yarn and wool, sewing and weaving, and always corn, "the cornfields of spotted corn,/white corn, red corn/four colors of corn, four suns." This peaceful natural order is shattered forever by man’s unnatural acts; the fields are drenched in blood and the people murdered. That Thunderweavers is a hard book to read is a tribute to the power of Herrera’s elegiac verses.

Both Turtle Pictures and Thunderweavers/Tejedoras de rayos demand to be read again and again. At each rereading one can participate in González’s and Herrera’s painful but perceptive re-envisioning of the past and present.

—Elaine Dunphy Foster
Hudson County (N.J.) Community College

09-4-0372

Lane, Pinkie Gordon. Elegy for Etheridge: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2000. 74 pp. ISBN 0-8071-2544-X, $22.50 (cl); 0-8071-2545-8, $14.95 (pb).

With subjects ranging from violins to death, Lane, five-time author and former Louisiana State Poet Laureate, finds splendor in the pleasure of home ownership and the hum of the dialysis machine in her newest compilation.

What is clever about Lane’s 29-poem collection is that some poems are actually "found"—pieces of news articles are rearranged in such a way as to be considered "poetic." A poem entitled "Gangsta Rap," taken from an item in Time magazine, asserts: "Life was sweet, good, like something out of a song Then he discovered gangsta rap Records bearing his name sold out in stores. . . . This has gone too far, he says It’s making us look like animals, he says . . . It’s time to give people their dreams back, he says . . . " In "On Being the Head of the English Department," Lane promises to "look with detachment/on the signing of contracts; . . . sing hymns of praise/to the negative, when/it is necessary to survive" and "hand [them]/the bread and the knife/but never the music and art/ of [her] existence," leading readers to ponder whether they have given up the love of something for monetary compensation, which she refuses to do.

Lane includes many more thought-provoking poems that, among other things, question the "Sexual Privacy of Women on Welfare," and eulogize Etheridge Knight, beloved poet. While readers who are not familiar with Knight or his work may not understand the reason for Lane’s elegy, they will appreciate the respect that Lane shows for such a poet and may be inspired to read his work. Admittedly, readers may have to reread this treasury to appreciate fully Lane’s flair and zeal for life, love, and simplicity. Such a task is well worth it in the end.

—Nikki D. Gilliam
Sunchaser’s Promotions
Los Angeles, Calif.

09-4-0373

Medina, Pablo. The Floating Island. Buffalo, N.Y.: White Pine Press, 1999. 104 pp. ISBN 1-893996-01-8, $14.00 (pb).

A poem in this anthology made me cry. Was it because the poem was about Cuba, and I’m Cuban? Definitely. But to explain away my reaction on the basis that the author and I share a common emotional background does not render justice to an outstanding poet.

For Medina’s talent goes beyond the island, goes beyond boundaries. Witness these lines:

There is an eloquent sadness in these lines that speaks for us all, no matter the country of birth. The poem addresses what there was but is no more. The poem speaks of the marginal existence that we all experience sooner or later. Medina captures this sentiment with words that are simple and direct, maybe even minimalist. But the sentiment speaks loudly because, as a poet who lives in exile, he knows quite well what it means to be an outsider and to remember a time when he belonged to something and someone.

The exile condition allows Medina to notice the loneliness of a November afternoon, the melancholy of a deserted beach, the nostalgia of an old Cuban wishing for his island. The condition of exile provokes pain, and the pain, like a pearl in an oyster, yields a thing of beauty: Medina’s poetry. This anthology might not make all readers cry. But it will make readers recall what they have left behind:

We drive somewhere,
we park and turn the motor off.
Then we face
the long walk in the cold wind…

—Danilo H. Figueredo
Bloomfield College Library

09-4-0374

Ortiz, Simon. From Sand Creek. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2000. 94 pp. ISBN 0-8165-1993-5, $10.95 (pb).

Ortiz titles this volume after the Sand Creek, Colorado, site of the 1864 massacre of Cheyenne and Arapahoe men, women, and children, and thereby he gives voice to the Native American experience. This book of short poems, each preceded by a brief entry, more caption than title, is full of deep feeling obliquely presented in the way only poetry can express the otherwise unspeakable. Not overt regret, but quiet sorrow, not uncontrolled fury, but righteous outrage; these emotions are presented as rather inert offerings—take them or leave them, but know that if you are capable of taking them, you will be changed. In common with Lance Henson’s Strong Heart Songs, several of the poems in From Sand Creek are set in a V.A. hospital. The eventual institutionalizing of the Indians—even, ironically, those who have served the U.S. government—seems somehow inevitable, the last affront. Yet in From Sand Creek springs hope as well. The land heals, time passes, and nature and human nature, in the Indian sense, prevail.

—Cherie Rusk
Salkum (Wash.) Timberland Library

09-4-0375

Smith, William Jay. The Cherokee Lottery. Willimantic, Conn.: Curbstone Press, 2000. 100 pp. ISBN 1-880684-66-7, $13.95 (pb).

Well-established poet Smith has composed a sequence of poems reconstructing the nineteenth-century history of the removal of indigenous peoples to the Indian territory of Oklahoma. The title poem, "The Cherokee Lottery," refers to the dispersal of Cherokee lands to non-Indians by drawing lots. The topics of Smith’s poems cover a variety of well-known historical events, including Sequoyah’s alphabet, the theatrical play based on the life of Osceola, and Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull’s participation in his Wild West show. A bonus in the book is the inclusion of historical illustrations tied to the poems’ topics.

Smith ventures into the contemporary age with two poems. The first addresses the issue of "Purebloods" and relies on the illustrations and narrative reconstructions of Charles Banks Wilson. The last poem discusses the Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, but brings the volume full circle by referencing the Cherokee Lottery.

While the poetry in this book is a powerful retelling of events, it also has a certain intellectual distance. For example, it lacks the knowing passion found in Navajo Luci Tapahonso’s recounting of "The Long Walk," where the reader feels that the poet is living events heard all her life. Likewise, Smith’s poem about "purebloods" seems to be a superficial treatment of complicated political issues of identity and blood quantum. The poems in this volume raise the reader’s interest in American Indian events, yet leave him or her yearning for an indigenous point of view.

—P. Jane Hafen
University of Nevada–Las Vegas

09-4-0376

Walcott, Derek. Tiepolo’s Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. 166 pp. Illus. by the author. ISBN 0-374-10587-1, $30.00.

In this recent tale in verse, Nobel laureate Walcott examines the world of artists, their inspiration, and their work. A painter himself, Walcott possesses the exceptional ability to marry content and style and has produced a stunning verbal work of art.

The text centers on the musings of a Caribbean narrator and painter on "the art of seeing" and the life of Impressionist artist Camille Pissarro. The latter, a French-born Jew of Portuguese descent, was reared on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas but returns to his native land to paint. There, his innovative, "heretical" vision causes him repeated rejection and self-doubt. The narrator, however, has nothing but praise for Pissarro, whose tenderness shows through even in winter scenes of Paris.

The artistry of the style is evident in the richness of colors and odors described in the first pages of the book. Two recurring images, a white dog’s thigh in a European painting and a black mongrel symbolizing island culture, epitomize the split between European art and the "life fermenting around" the people of the Caribbean. The addition of Walcott’s own paintings as illustrations helps to solidify the rapport between the text and the world of art. Highly recommended.

—Jayne R. Boisvert
Russell Sage College