There’s no racing through poetry, turning pages and pages to get to the end. It’s savored, sipped and contemplated. For the last couple of years, I’ve been starting my mornings with a page or two of poetry, highlighting the lines I especially like and turning them over in my head throughout the day.
I’ve read some good work, but so far, no collection has had half as many highlighted passages as I made in José Olivarez’s second collection, Promises of Gold.
In language that dances between the lovely and the straightforward, Olivarez paints a vivid picture of being a first-generation American, of chasing the American Dream his parents dreamed of in their trek from Mexico, and male relationships. Those identities of his intersect with none of mine, and yet I found his work clear, evocative, and resonant. On repeat in my mind was, “what could we do but grow hearts on top of our hearts?/ to blow kisses at the worms/licking their lips at us? to delay/the grave by one more day?/ then one more day after that,” he writes in “In Calumet City.” And, in “Miracle,” “we try to contain our grief/ like children trying to keep a butterfly alive/in a sealed jar […] we are here too briefly/to ignore the miracle of touch”. More grimly, in “Perder,” “once the losing begins/it won’t stop/until it has taken everything.”
Throughout this collection, I got the sense I was missing subtext I might have gotten if I had immigrant parents or Mexican ancestry or was from his neighborhood or was simply male. One of my favorites was “Ojalá: Me & My Guys,” an ode to male friendship. Though I found it powerful, it had a visible effect on my husband when I read it aloud to him. “good,” Olivarez writes, “my homies are always good/when i ask & i don’t ask enough.” Maybe this culture of stiff-upper-lippedness is stronger in male relationships, and maybe I was only enjoying the crumbs of resonance.
Then again, isn’t that one of the real strengths of literature? That a writer can say, “this is something that happened to me, and this is how it feels,” and we, strangers who might have a lot or little in common with that author, say, “Ah, I see,” and we both walk away enriched from the words upon the page. Perhaps that experience is more straightforward in prose, but poetry is the medium by which we are forced to consider longer and deeper to parse and unspool meaning. Whether or not I was Olivarez’s target audience, I found myself profoundly moved by many poems in this collection.
A final note: As is fitting for a work like this, there’s also a Spanish translation that I’m told is excellent. Reading the Translator’s Note about translator David Ruano González’s process and approach made me wish I lived in that language, too, so I could experience these poems again for the first time. If you do happen to be bilingual, the ebook contains both versions.
Ring Reads 