Diva

by Rafael Campo

Rafael Campo seems to have recognized early on that, like William Carlos Williams, his work as a physician gives him entry into what Williams called "the secret gardens of the self." No wonder Campo's best poetry has always drawn on his knowledge of the human body and his informed compassion for the sick. But if the ghost of Williams hovers over the pages of Diva, so does that of Walt Whitman, with his life-affirming philosophy of connection and brotherhood, and his joyous acceptance of the flesh. Campo's third collection is arranged in five sections, the first drawing an imaginative map of Cuba and the poet's conflicted feelings toward his paternal homeland. In "The Dream of Loving Cuba," he It's half-erect beneath America on all my maps-- just look at how it wants me, shamelessly, a geographic urge that can't be helped, a crime of nature, both a heretic and ever faithful to its needs. Indeed, Campo is often strongest when describing experiences beyond his own, whether the subject is pre-revolutionary Cuba, motherhood, or slow death from AIDS. His is the voice from the bedside, the voice of the interested onlooker. This capability serves him well in "Baby Pictures," a long prose poem on maternity, in which childbirth becomes a metaphor for every sort of origin. Sometimes, however, he appears to view womanhood in the Latin manner, as an exotic and unfortunate condition (see his poem on the great, lost Audre Lorde.) Even in "The Pelvic Exam," in which the narrator-cum-doctor explores a teenage girl's pelvic cavity for signs of cancer, his empathy seems to be at war with his horror of being penetrated, of "At first the tears that drop are half-controlled. / Abnormal bleeding after periods / Has made her pain's unwilling centerfold." The book ends with Campo's fluid, admirable translations of Lorca's queer-themed Sonnets of Dark Love. The author also adds a note about Lorca's influence on his own work, explaining that he spent years "trying to make my English sound like Spanish, that elusive inner language of my lost childhood in Latin America." Whether he's succeeded in this bit of linguistic cross-pollination is hard to gauge. But in his frequent use of rhyme and his gift for observing his immediate environment, Campo has undoubtedly produced a satisfying, accessible body of work, which has won him a pair of Lambda Literary Awards and a nomination for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award. The poems in Diva, especially the title poem à clef on adolescent clarity and angst, should only extend his considerable audience. --Regina Marler

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer

Hardcover

First published August 20, 1999

About the author

Dr. Rafael Campo, MD (Harvard Medical School, 1992; M.A., English, Amherst College; B.S., neuroscience, Amherst College), is a poet and doctor of internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is also on the faculty of Lesley University's Creative Writing MFA Program.

His first collection of poems, The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World, won the National Poetry Series Open Competition in 1993. What the Body Told (1996) won a Lambda Literary Award, and Diva was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999. The Poetry of Healing (1996) also received a Lambda Literary Award for Memoir.

Campo is a PEN Center West Literary Award finalist and a recipient of the National Hispanic Academy of Arts and Sciences Annual Achievement Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Echoing Green Foundation. He frequently lectures widely and gives seminars and workshops relating to medicine, literary writing, and culture.

Reviews

[Duke Press]

"Diva . . . sings across an extraordinary range of tones and topics. . . . Campo’s poems have always negotiated the difficult terrain of identity across these very complicated categories, and the ones in Diva refine that further, often taking glorious flight as they celebrate the very earthbound complexities of the experiences they explore. . . . His poems both dance and sing, and offer his readers a rare opportunity to enjoy the music of a poetry not afraid, or ashamed, to belt out its beautiful and painful truths.”--The Washington Blade

“[A] virtuoso display. . . . Campo is a master of image. . . . His poems are revealing and courageous.”--Jay A. Liveson, Journal of the American Medical Association

“Like William Carlos Williams and John Stone, Campo is a physician-poet who uses the discipline of medicine to read back to us our fascination with AIDS, the representation of the diva, and the struggle for compassion. . . . In the spirit of Meredith, Campo writes mordant lyrics of dark love that displace trite expectations of what sonnets or canciones should accomplish. His work is devoid of cheap romanticizing.”--Jerry W. Ward Jr., Washington Post Book World

“Rafael Campo is perhaps our most distinguished physician-poet since William Carlos Williams. . . . [His] sense of a common humanity is hard-won against the ugliness, misery, and cruelty that he must confront in his practice.”--David Bergman, The Gay and Lesbian Review

[Lesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

this poet is brilliant. he mixes more formal style and free verse together in his poems. and they are moving. laurie-if you read this comment, he has one about the x-files that i'll have to email you.