Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

And After All is a feast of masterful formal poems embracing a variety of personas and themes but weighted toward poems about the brave fragility of mortal flesh, the aging body, loss, and bereavement. The tone is, for the most part, mellow, quietly elegiac, inclined to focus on the goodness in things. Espaillat is a Dominican immigrant, and, in one poem meditating on what "home" means, she arrives at the peaceable conclusion that, with regard to the Dominican Republic and the United States, "both, both are home." A gentle love of country also runs like an undercurrent through a poem considering the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, "born...to lead great people through harsh times." In the poem "On the Curious, Intimate and Reactive Nature of Human Identity," the speaker describes an encounter with an anti-Semite who mistakes her for a Jewish person (only her husband is Jewish), acting hatefully toward her in a way that makes her wish she actually were Jewish: "I was not born to what he thinks that 'shame,' / but claim the right to share it, as my due." In the face of aging and disease, she chooses to interpret the sound of a human heartbeat as a perpetually optimistic "Oh, Wow!"

After decades as a distinguished poet, Espaillat has wisdom to share about the writing process, as in the poem "Connection," where the speaker professes that she is no longer "speaking to impress / some glib young stranger at a party," but now prioritizes the act of "listen[ing]," having grown more accepting of "silences...and contradictions." Espaillat's lifelong love for written language is evident everywhere, but especially in the extended metaphor at the heart of "Hammock," which compares a hammock's shape to an open parenthesis ("as if some sentence, earth to sky, / chose you for subject"), while likening the hammock's undulations to "the wide / cursive of children." There are plenty of felicitous metaphors afoot: a pubertal girl "moves as if a rumor of green fires, / rising through her stem, spread to the lace / of silky sleeves, and then her petaled face / were lifted in the air, / abashed to hear hosannas everywhere." The human body "sulks" like a jealous housewife while its distracted owner "philander[s] after the soul." The short poem "In Darkened Rooms" is one of the best, in that it doesn't explicate its central metaphor, just letting it sit pregnant and suggestive alongside the situation it has been tagged to.

Although this book is largely a showcase for her unimpeachable mastery of the sonnet form, Espaillat also offers lessons on how to write longer narrative poems: the best of these is the restrained blank verse "Rosario on Sunday Morning," in which an old woman reminisces on how she once had the integrity to reject a suitor whose love she did not entirely requite despite her earthy father's practical advice, "When there's no bread, cassava's good enough." Rather than explaining too much or forcing a pat resolution, Espaillat chooses to end the poem simply with the haunting image of "honeysuckle smell...like a pall / over my bed, as if a wall of sorrow / shut out the town and everything that's in it / but bells, as they might sound tolled under water."

I love Rhina P. Espaillat. One of the finest people I have ever known. Listening to her read is a joy as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj84y...

Jimmy wrote: "I love Rhina P. Espaillat. One of the finest people I have ever known. Listening to her read is a joy as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj84y..."

I met her at the Newburyport Poetry Festival a few years back. I agree she's a nice person and fine reader.