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A review by ostrowk
Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982-2002 by Martín Espada
4.0
"This is the year that squatters evict landlords, / gazing like admirals from the rail / of the roofdeck / or levitating hands in praise / of steam in the shower; / this is the year / that shawled refugees deport judges / who stare at the floor / and their swollen feet / as files fare stamped with their destinations..." (117).
"Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul / two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other, / mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue: / Teach me to dance. we have no music here. /And the other said with a Spanish tongue: / I will teach you. Music is all we have" (232).
Espada's poetry bristles with a left politics that exalts the dispossessed and indicts the ruling class, but it does so in a way that hardly stretches language; in fact, for poetry, it often felt flat in my mouth and dull on the page. Still, ALABANZA features two of my all-time favorite poems: "Imagine the Angels of Bread" (a revolutionary New Year's poem) and "Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100" (a poem for the union workers who died in 9/11). The collection also introduced me to a few others I really liked, and I'm ultimately so grateful for Espada. As he points out, "there are poets / who versify vacations in Tuscany, / the villa on a hill, the light of morning / ... poets who cannot sleep as they contemplate / the extinction of iambic pentameter" ( 227); he is not one of those frivolous poets. Instead, he's trying to lyrically tell the story of massacres brushed under the rug of history, of the evicted, of the immigrant, of the union worker, of the free press, of the kid in juvie so desperate to write poetry that he keeps landing himself time in solitary to write. Espada, in other words, is the people's poet: alabanza.
"Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul / two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other, / mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue: / Teach me to dance. we have no music here. /And the other said with a Spanish tongue: / I will teach you. Music is all we have" (232).
Espada's poetry bristles with a left politics that exalts the dispossessed and indicts the ruling class, but it does so in a way that hardly stretches language; in fact, for poetry, it often felt flat in my mouth and dull on the page. Still, ALABANZA features two of my all-time favorite poems: "Imagine the Angels of Bread" (a revolutionary New Year's poem) and "Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100" (a poem for the union workers who died in 9/11). The collection also introduced me to a few others I really liked, and I'm ultimately so grateful for Espada. As he points out, "there are poets / who versify vacations in Tuscany, / the villa on a hill, the light of morning / ... poets who cannot sleep as they contemplate / the extinction of iambic pentameter" ( 227); he is not one of those frivolous poets. Instead, he's trying to lyrically tell the story of massacres brushed under the rug of history, of the evicted, of the immigrant, of the union worker, of the free press, of the kid in juvie so desperate to write poetry that he keeps landing himself time in solitary to write. Espada, in other words, is the people's poet: alabanza.