Imagine the Angels of Bread. - book reviews

Progressive, The, Jan, 1997 by Matthew Rothschild

My favorite book of poetry this year is Imagine the Angels of Bread, by Martin Espada (Norton). Here he continues to serve up his trademark vignettes of the indignities that working-class and immigrant Americans suffer every day. Some of these poems are similar to those he offered in his previous works, Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover's Hands and City of Coughing and Dead Radiators.

This collection shows Espada moving beyond the forms that he has mastered. Now, in places, the style is less reportorial and more magical and redemptive, as in the title poem, which begins: "This is the year that squatters evict landlords," and ends with:

This is the year that those

who swim the border's undertow

and shiver in boxcars

are greeted with trumpets and drums

at the first railroad crossing.

By far the most impressive poem is the ten-page epic, "Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies," which is dedicated to Clemente Soto Velez, the great Puerto Rican poet who was imprisoned for his activism and who died in 1993. Espada knew him well, and the poem retells the life of Clemente Soto Velez and the cause of Puerto Rican independence. The coda for the poem goes like this:

Hands without irons become dragonflies

red flowers rain on our hats

subversive angels flutter like pigeons

from a rooftop,

this stripped and starving earth is not a

grave.

Espada actually visits the grave of Clemente Soto Velez, and after the telling of his heroic life, the site is a shock:

He is here: burial mound 75, says the

gravedigger.

So the poet who named us

suffocates in the anonymity of dirt.

This is how the bodies of dissenters

disappear.

Not many poets can pull off the long form. But Espada has done the trick. Note to all writers and reviewers: Avoid the word "luminous." I saw it everywhere this year. Put it up on the shelf. It's a devalued coin, tarnished by overuse. Find a new adjective.

Matthew Rothschild is the Editor of The Progressive.