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If you have not come across his work before, his new book The Republic of Poetry (Norton, £12) is a great place to start. It’s not hard to see why Espada has been called ‘the North American Neruda’. It’s Espada’s eighth collection, and it is a knockout, warm and big-hearted, carried by Espada’s strong, easy-going voice, expansive, generous, free-wheeling and radical. At the heart of the book is a series of poems written for the centenary of Pablo Neruda’s birth in 2004. It’s fantastic stuff, uplifting, moving and unforgiving. There is a beautiful sequence dedicated to Joan and Victor Jara (‘Something escapes the bonfire / where the generals warm their hands, / embers from burnt paper, buried tapes, / voices teeming in the silence’) and a stunning portrait of fascism in ‘General Pinochet at the Bookstore’. It’s also a utopian book, a quest for the ‘republic of poetry’ where writers ‘bombard the national palace / with poems’, and ‘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.’ Magic. |
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