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PARTISAN REVIEW
cause a recognizable and complex human image has been evoked from a
minimum of information.
Perhaps Espada's most memorable poems are the ones that render the
vitality of Latino culture with a kind of sardonic brio, as in "Latin Night
at the Pawnshop," with its playful reminiscence of Pound's "In a Station
of the Metro":
The apparition of a salsa band
gleaming in the Liberty Loan
pawnshop window:
Golden trumpet,
silver trombone,
congas, maracas, tambourine,
all
with price
tags
dangling
like the city morgue ticket
on a dead man's toe.
The poem executes a wonderful pseudo-Imagist double take as the
instruments become by turns metonymies for life and for death, the salsa
band in all its raucous vigor and the silent corpses that poverty and need
has turned them into. Another very funny poem, "The Saint Vincent de
Paul Food Pantry Stomp," transforms the speaker's furtive attempt to
conceal and take possession of a stray dollar bill while tying his shoes into
a salsa-tinged dance performed in honor of the patron saint of canned
food. In both these poems Espada offers a wry yet biting analysis of the
tangled relations between ethnic culture and that ever-in-demand
commodity, money.
Not all Espada's poems are funny, however. The book opens with an
ambitious suite of poems centered on Puerto Rico's struggle with colonial
rule, a struggle figured as a volatile interaction of history and hands. The
book's title poem tells of a fifty-year-old massacre whose impact is regis–
tered in the way "the news/ halted the circular motion" of one woman's
hands "as she embroidered the wedding dress" for her marriage to one of
the dead men. That motion is resumed metaphorically as the poem ends,
conflated now with the motion of struggle itself: "But rebellion/ is the
circle of a lover's hands,/ that must keep moving,/ always weaving." If
Espada's poems occasionally become heavy-handed in their use of
metaphor, that is a risk he is clearly willing to take, conscious as he is of
all the burdens hands must assume if they wish to engage with history.
David Mura's
After We Lost Our Way
is much more eclectic in its
concerns. What Mura shares with Espada is a sense of history as tragic
