SF Chronicle

		Tuesday, December 5, 2006 (SF Chronicle) Power and poetry do go hand in verse Megan Harlan The Republic of Poetry By Martín Espada NORTON; 63 PAGES; $23.95 What sort of place is "The Republic of Poetry"? As portrayed in the title poem of Martín Espada's dynamic eighth collection, it's a place where poets eat for free in restaurants, where "poets rent a helicopter/ to bombard the national palace/ with poems on bookmarks," and where the "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." While such a land might sound like a fanciful literature-loving utopia, what's described here is the very real republic of Chile -- to which the poem is dedicated, and whose culture and recent history provide the lion's share of inspiration for the book. Yet Chile is not the only muse here: The book's three sections provide a triptych of metaphorical "republics" of poetry, including the poetry of elegy -- where both the past and the dead are visited -- and the poetry of protest. Throughout, poetry is shown to bear the power to dissolve, reshape and illuminate the borders of time and place. Espada, a Brooklyn native whose parents hailed from Puerto Rico, has long been inspired by Latin American poetry (of which he is a widely published translator), and most especially by Chile's most esteemed and extraordinary poet, Pablo Neruda. Today Espada teaches courses on Neruda,along with creative writing classes, as a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. And in his own poetry (for which he has won the American Book Award), he often seems to work in the tradition of Neruda, displaying a vibrant, far-reaching and distinctively openhearted imagination on matters both political and personal. The book's outstanding first section is a cycle of 12 poems based on Espada's 2004 trip to Chile, where he took part in celebrations of the 100th anniversary of Pablo Neruda's birth. Throughout this section, the legacy of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's brutal dictatorship casts grisly shadows. "Rain Without Rain" details the centenary celebrations at Neruda's former home in the coastal town of Isla Negra, where thousands of people, young and old, take turns reciting Neruda's work -- many with "faces of the disappeared on signs strung/ around their necks." Neruda's seaside home is also the setting for one of the collection's strangest and most beautiful poems, "City of Glass," which opens with these lines: "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 ..." -- a serene, inspiring world smashed to "a thousand daggers" by right-wing soldiers after Neruda's death. But in the final stanza, Espada imagines the imagery of glass -- its light-conducting beauty and transformative properties -- overtaking Chile itself, so that "a river of glass bubbled, cooled,/ hardened, and rose in sheets, only to crash and rise again." Espada's clarity of language, structural control and kinetic imagery allow the reader easy entry to such imaginative leaps. Take "Not Here," in which Espada describes meeting with the Chilean poet Raul Zurita to hear his experience of Sept. 11, 1973 -- the day Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, was overthrown and killed in a CIA-backed military coup that established Pinochet as the country's murderous dictator. Though the poem zigzags across decades and continents-- from the two men walking through the presidential palace in 2004, to the navy ship in 1973 where Zurita was tortured, to Espada's concurrent misspent youth, to the White House plotters of the coup -- these flinty narrative pieces spark against each other, bursting with meaning. The second section contains a half dozen poems honoring other poets and writers, including an elegy for 20th century Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos and an ode to South African poet and activist Dennis Brutus. In a tribute to his mentor, the poet Robert Creeley, Espada traces Creeley's peripatetic, decade-spanning path from Sleepy Hollow to Mexico, writing, "You had an all-night conversation with the world." The section ends with the uncharacteristically goofy "Advice to Young Poets," which in its entirety reads: "Never pretend/ to be a unicorn/ by sticking a plunger on your head." Several ambitious anti-war poems appear in the brief final section. "The God of the Weather-Beaten Face" lists a surreal pantheon of bloodthirsty deities to whom the real figure of Sgt. Camilo Mejía, protesting the Iraq war, "said no" and "walked to jail" -- an image Espada likens to crossing "epiphany's gate." By contrast, the book's last poem is intensely personal: "The Caves of Camuy" imagines the anesthetic-induced dream experienced by Espada's wife during her hysterectomy. In the vision, the couple's friend, the late poet Clemente Soto Velez, implores her to paint portraits of wild beauty -- encapsulated in the magnificent Puerto Rican caves of the poem's title -- as if such images were "your sons and daughters pouring from the mouth of the world." With expansive, shape-shifting borders, "The Republic of Poetry" is rich in the form's regenerative power. Megan Harlan is a Bay Area poet, fiction writer and journalist. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2006 SF Chronicle