FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                         

CONTACT: Winfrida Mbewe, 212-790-4325 wmbewe@wwnorton.com

THE REPUBLIC OF POETRY

by Martín Espada

“What a tender, marvelous collection. First, that broken, glorious journey into the redemptive heart of my Chile, and then, as if that had not been enough, the many gates of epiphanies and sorrows being opened again and again, over and over.” —Ariel Dorfman

“Martín Espada is a poet of annunciation and denunciation, a bridge between Whitman and Neruda, a conscientious objector in the war of silence.” —Ilan Stavans

In his eighth collection of poems, Martín Espada celebrates the power of poetry itself. THE REPUBLIC OF POETRY [W.W. Norton & Company; October 2, 2006; $23.95; Cloth], is a place of odes and elegies, collective memory and hidden history, miraculous happenings and redemptive justice. Rafael Campo says: “The Republic of Poetry is a dreamland, a utopia, a paradise of the imagination, where the local food is salutation and valediction, where the bloodstained plazas speak history, and where the law of the land is empathy.”

Espada traveled to Chile in July 2004 to take part in the commemoration of the Pablo Neruda centenary. The first part of the collection is a cycle of Chile poems, praised by Ariel Dorfman as “that broken, glorious journey into the redemptive heart of my Chile.” This is a narrative of creation, destruction and renewal: Neruda’s house in Santiago, wrecked by the military during the 1973 coup and rehabilitated in a democratic Chile; Joan Jara walking through the stadium where her husband Víctor was executed after singing for his fellow prisoners; the young poets who rent a helicopter and “bomb” the national palace with poetry on bookmarks; the disgraced ex-dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, jeered leaving a used bookstore.

Espada writes of visiting La Chascona, Neruda’s Santiago home, in “City of Glass:”

 

            The poet’s house was a city of glass:

            cranberry glass, milk glass, carnival glass,

            red and green goblets row after row,

            black luster of wine in bottles,

            ships in bottles, zoo of bottles,

            rooster, horse, monkey, fish,

            heartbeat of clocks tapping against crystal,

            windows illuminated by the white Andes,

            observatory of glass over Santiago.

 

The poem is dedicated to Neruda and his wife Matilde, who defiantly held the poet’s wake at the ransacked house, and their vindication in post-Pinochet Chile, when  “One day, years later, the soldiers wheeled around / to find themselves in a city of glass.”

THE REPUBLIC OF POETRY is a land where poets return from the dead. The second part of the book features a series of elegies written to poets. Espada pays homage to his friend Robert Creeley, who “had an all-night conversation with the world,” and honors the great Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, whose words move a man in jail to paint her portrait on an envelope. There is also an affectionate, tongue-in-cheek tribute to the practice of poetry. Captain Ahab leads a rather demanding poetry workshop in Provincetown, while Espada’s “Advice to Young Poets” consists of the following: “Never pretend / to be a unicorn / by sticking a plunger on your head.”

The third and final part of the collection includes a sequence of anti-war poems. Sam Hamill, the founder of Poets Against War, writes: “Martín Espada’s big-hearted poems reconfirm ‘The Republic of Poetry’ that (dares) to insist upon its dreams of justice and mercy even during the age of perpetual war.” Thus, the poet speaks on behalf of Camilo Mejia, an immigrant and Iraq war veteran turned conscientious objector, walking through the jailhouse door and “epiphany’s gate.” Again, Espada invokes his poetic compañeros, particularly the veteran poets of the Viet Nam war, “seers unseen waiting at the coffee shop for bacon and eggs,” their warnings ignored as the present-day war rages on.

THE REPUBLIC OF POETRY comes full circle in the closing poem, as the spirit of poet Clemente Soto Vélez returns in a dream and urges a pilgrimage to the caves of Puerto Rico, the island of Espada’s ancestors. Indeed, as Samuel Hazo observes, "Espada means ‘sword’ in Spanish, and in these new poems Martín Espada wields the sword of his poetry like a veritable Zorro...Espada unites in these poems the fierce allegiances of Latin American poetry to freedom and glory with the democratic tradition of Whitman, and the result is a poetry of fire and passionate intelligence."

About the Author

Martín Espada is the winner of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.  He teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Title: THE REPUBLIC OF POETRY

Author: Martín Espada

Publication Date: October 2, 2006

ISBN-10: 0-393-06256-2

Price: $23.95; cloth