Vermont Review

Published in VERMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS, October,2006.

Freedom’s Bruises

Review: The Republic of Poetry by Martín Espada (Norton, 2006)

By Beth Kanell


What do you love the most? Who do you love the most? Can you paint images with your love; can you spin it into tapestries, weave it into songs that fly into the swirling clouds or dive into bold oceans?


Martín Espada can.


His new collection, The Republic of Poetry, is nearly slim enough for a hip pocket. Barely 60 pages long, it quivers with tenderness and the raw bruised tissue of freedom that's been assaulted and battered until it hides in basements and under staircases.


But it lives. Freedom, and the love of it, live.


Born and raised in New York, Espada rebelled against the constriction of “North” American life during the entirely personal battering he received in high school, where the label “spic” paralleled the actions “spit” and “kick.” Son of a hugely courageous Puerto Rican father, who'd long ago decided life only held meaning if he fought for his rights, Espada prowled the depths of poverty and armed himself with the legal tools to fight for a route out of there, for himself and others, as he became a paralegal, an advocate for the mentally ill, an voice for the imprisoned, the powerless, those without the “right” tongues in an America that respects mostly strength and wealth.


Now, in his eighth collection of poems, he wields the machete of words (for espada in Spanish is sword, or blade) as a sharp and controlled tool. He paints love across the pages, both love of countries and love of people, of freedom's fighters. In this alchemical embrace, he draws the reader, the listener, into that love - and inserts the seeds of revolution.

The collection opens the first of its three sections, “The Republic of Poetry,” with the poem of that title: a poem that imagines a country where poets are esteemed, celebrated. A train of images coalesces in a final sweet stanza:


In the republic of poetry
the guard at the airport
will not allow you to leave the country
until you declaim a poem for her
and she says Ah! Beautiful.

The poem is dedicated “for Chile” and is part of a cycle of pomes that responds to Espada's 2004 visit to that place of horrors and disappearances and deaths that is, even so, home to poets. It was the home of Pablo Neruda, the poet with whom Espada has been most identified, through both study and an apprenticeship of words. In Espada's hands, the country is person after person. And those people don't stand on each other's shoulders to reach higher. Instead, they stand on each other's graves. Espada seizes the opportunity to give more meaning to such deaths. Visiting Isla Negra, Neruda's town, for the centenary of Neruda's birth, Espada spills the voices and movements of poetry's pilgrims into his stanzas. Here where “Three decades ago the dictator / flicked a white-gloved hand / and the disappeared were gone:” but this is also the place where those who carry on for Neruda read or recite his poems. At last,


At the tomb, a woman silent all along
steps from the circle and says:
I want to sing. Neruda. Poem Twenty.
Then she climbs atop the tomb and sings:
Tonight I can write the saddest verses.

After a bitter pair of poems that address the cruelty perpetrated by Chile's General Pinochet, Espada slips masterfully into his second section, “The Poet's Coat.” Here, five powerful elegies rise. One salutes a Viet Nam vet; another, Robert Creeley; another the Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, who ignited flames through her love of that island as she also struggled to live today's feminist liberation - fifty years too soon to find it a blessing. When a Puerto Rican jailed in Hartford connects vividly with the passionate lines of de Burgos in her most famous poem, “Río Grande de Loíza,” evidence of the man's grief and unstoppable appreciation finds its way, quite literally, into Espada's hands and becomes the climax to his elegy “The Face on the Envelope.”


Although Espada is sometimes proclaimed as “the Latino poet of our generation,” his search for justice in The Republic of Poetry goes far beyond the southern realms of islands, conquered nations, struggling democracies, layers of poverty cloaked in the global inequality that enriches the northern nations while the southern ones continue to wrestle for emergence. The third section of the collection tackles the wars of our time: in Viet Nam and in Iraq, where to object by reason of conscience is as dangerous as every pacifist move has always been. Again Espada draws the pain and witness out by speaking for and of one person at a time: himself as a youth, attacked and bleeding in a coldly silent apartment building hallway; a conscientious objector named Camilo Mejía; his own wife and son, at the moment of the child's birth and naming, in the name of mercy, Clemente.


As he did in the mosaic of memory and meaning of his 1998 essay collection Zapata's Disciple, Espada speaks of the people he cares about and who have cared about him. Through these windows into a soul by turns indignant, tear-stricken, and elated, a light shines, a light of welcome. Remarkably, even the “privileged” of American can link arms with the freedom fighters here; the battle for human dignity need not be reserved for the oppressed. If we are not the dancers and singers in this round, we can be the ones who lift them to the stages where they can erupt in doing what humans are born to do:

Something escapes the bonfire
where the generals warm their hands,
embers from burnt paper, buried tapes,
voices teeming in the silence
like the invisible creatures in a glass of water,
how a dancer spins to the music in her head,
alone but for the tingle of fingertips at her elbow.

Beth Kanell is co-owner of Kingdom Books, a poetry, mystery, and fine press specialty shop in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.