Authors: Martin Espada
ISBN-13: 9780393312171, ISBN-10: 0393312178
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Date Published: September 1994
Edition: Reprint
Martín Espada's The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
"With this fine new collection," says Library Journal, Martín Espada "joins the top ranks of poets anywhere"; in the words of Earl Shorris, he is "well on his way to becoming the Latino poet of his generation."
In his fourth book, Espada ( Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover's Hands ) writes powerfully of the disenfranchised urban Latino poor: ``I cannot evict them / from my insomniac nights.'' The poetry has a direct, proclamatory tone, at its best when summoning and sustaining intimacy. In ``White Birch,'' for example, a birth is described: ``The boy was snagged on that spiraling bone. / Medical fingers prodded your pink center / while you stared at a horizon of water / no one else could see, creatures leaping silver / with tails that slashed the air / like your agonized tongue.'' Brooklyn-born Espada draws on his tenants' rights work in Boston for strong images in several poems--``the girl surrounded by a pleading carousel / of children, in Spanish bewilderment, / sleepless and rat-vigilant, / who wins reluctant extermination / but loses the youngest, / lead paint retarded.'' Some poems cascade with strong visions and descend into squalor, horror, or the picaresque, yet forming wholes out of them can be problematic; they may grandstand at crucial points, or drift into pieties. On the other hand, ``The Toolmaker Unemployed,'' an austere lyric supported by assonance and incremental ponderings, is as spare in its form as we imagine an old man's diminishing sense of worth to be. (Aug.)
The Hidalgo's Hat and a Hawk's Bell of Gold | 17 | |
The Admiral and the Snake | 19 | |
The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive | 21 | |
Cockroaches of Liberation | 23 | |
El Grito de Pepaberta | 25 | |
Coca-Cola and Coco Frio | 26 | |
Day of the Dead on Wortman Avenue | 28 | |
Borofels | 30 | |
Prayer for Brother Burglar | 32 | |
The Skull Beneath the Skin of the Mango | 34 | |
Fidel in Ohio | 36 | |
City of Coughing and Dead Radiators | 39 | |
Courthouse Graffiti for Two Voices | 42 | |
Tires Stacked in the Hallways of Civilization | 43 | |
Mi Vida: Wings of Fright | 44 | |
The Broken Window of Rosa Ramos | 46 | |
The Legal Aid Lawyer Has an Epiphany | 48 | |
Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper | 49 | |
The Toolmaker Unemployed | 50 | |
Transient Hotel Sky at the Hour of Sleep | 52 | |
The Music of Astronomy | 55 | |
Don't Worry, Son, You're in the Care of Mental Health Professionals | 56 | |
The Arm | 57 | |
Memorial Day Parade at the Viet Coffee House | 58 | |
Ashes and Donuts | 59 | |
DSS Dream | 60 | |
Blackballed by the Rainbow Girls | 63 | |
White Birch | 66 | |
The Carnival Leaves for the Next Town | 68 | |
The Rifle in My Hands | 69 | |
The Lesson of My Uncle's Nose | 70 | |
The Year I Was Diagnosed with a Sacrilegious Heart | 72 | |
The Other Alamo | 75 | |
Author's Note: When Songs Become Water | 79 | |
When Songs Become Water | 80 | |
Cuando los cantos se vuelven agua | 81 | |
Glossary of Spanish Terms | 85 | |
Biographical Note | 89 |