Azores: Poems

by David Yezzi, Donald R. Kennon (Editor)

A Slate Best Book of 2008
Included in Pushcart Prize Best of the Small Presses Like a voyage to the Portuguese islands of the title, the poems in Azores arrive at their striking and hard-won destinations over the often-treacherous waters of experience—a man mourns the fact that he cannot not mourn, a father warns his daughter about harsh contingency, an unnamed visitor violently disrupts a quiet domestic scene. The ever-present and uncomfortable realities of envy, lust, and mortality haunt the book from poem to poem. Yezzi does not shy away from frank assessments of desire and human failing, the persistent difficulties of which are relieved periodically by a cautious optimism and even joy. Whether the poem’s backdrop is volcanic islands in the Mid-Atlantic or Manhattan Island at sunset, Yezzi examines the forces of change in the natural world, as w hether mundane or startlingly intimate. By turns plainspoken, caustic, evocative, and wry, these poems are, in matters of form, well-wrought and musical and, in matters of the heart, clear-eyed and always richly human.

Genres: Poetry

56 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[paulA neves · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not the only one who picked up this book thinking it was actually about about the Azores. I know poetry isn't supposed to be literal, but as a Portuguese-American and poet, obviously I'm going to be attracted to that rare something that speaks to the two. Portuguese-American voices are under-represented as it is in American letters. And the work of writers like Millicent Borges Accardi and Carlos Matos, to name two who have actually written to/from Azorean contexts, doesn't get the attention it deserves. Certainly there's a long tradition of poets coopting cultures and locales (real or imagined) to make the personal (real or imagined) universal. But the most resonant poems here are those that read as personal and particular, that make music, for instance, out of the memories left in an empty NYC apartment; the coldness of an estranged relationship with a father, the quiet sting of professional jealousy in a friendship. There are many strong poems in this collection: Yezzi's ear and sly handling of rhyme and form, uplift, even make playful, downer subjects. I just don't think the Azores needed to be invoked to do it. In fact, the eponymous archipelago of of sonnets that conclude the first part of the collection, well crafted as they are, mostly left me out at sea. As Yezzi himself writes in one, "The fact of land's not what your dreams foretell." This book was published in 2008. So, at this point, who cares, right? Just that, Americans have been exoticizing Portugal for the last couple of decades...

Yankee, stay home.

[Marilyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yezzi is editor of the New Criterion, and deserves that honor. He's skilled at nuance, which matters most, AND he has a musical ear, something that is often absent in 21st century poetry. Listen:

Who bothers to look for what's not lost?
Some morning, on the bus,
we'll pass this very street marbled in frost
and spin around to catch a glimpse of us
crossing with the children to the park....

Get the book, go read!

[Diann Blakely]

And yet I'm still waiting for the publication of Yezzi's monumental "Tomorrow and Tomorrow." In the meantime, others interested in the poetry and prose of his daring and dazzling intellect should look on the BEST AMERICAN POETRY b-site or for the essay he wrote on the dramatic element too often missing from contemporary poetry, which was picked up by POETRY DAILY.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Liam Malone · Rating 4 out of 5]

These were okay, filling in my long list of books of morbid poetry. I like the one where he sort of feels remorse for not mourning his dead dad.

[Lyndsey Silveira]

The poems in the beginning aren't to my taste but it gets better in the middle. I also mistakenly picked it up thinking it was all poems about the Azores...but it's not.