“The Ghosts in April”:
Lorna Dee Cervantes’s April on Olympia.
Review
by Koon Woon
Lorna
Dee Cervantes. April in Olympia. East Rockaway, NY, Marsh Hawk Press,
2021, 139 pages, $18.00.
The kinds of ghosts that haunt Lorna Dee
Cervantes’ April on Olympia are literary giants, social activists,
friends, lovers, her murdered mother and an entire people, the Olmecs.
Cervantes invokes T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” in prefacing the second section
of the book by “April in Olympia.” [The Olympics is a mountain range in
Washington State, where the poet currently resides in Seattle]. There is
something noteworthy about the book cover. It is a photo of a new tree growing
in the center of a large stump of a dead tree, suggesting that nothing really
“dies,” and that memories at least remain. And so this book is largely a
collection of memories and addressing people who are no longer here on this plane or who is out
of the reach of the author.
Cervantes acknowledges her artistic debts
to Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell, Art Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, Pablo Neruda,
James Baldwin, Theodore Roethke, and even Shakespeare. She also pays tribute to
social activists Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, and there is even a
“love” poem for Donald Trump. This is to show that the poet is not fooled or
tricked, especially in her mock-serious comic poem, “Constipation,” where the
character described by Cervantes likes to make people wait, but who was everything
that can swell a progress or two and he chooses to do nothing but to admire
himself for his good looks and powers, and in short, he was “a constipation of
character, a ration of waste.”
This book is divided into five
sections. The first two sections are on Olympia which are hard-hitting poems as
the author warned in the preface that the poems contain “disturbing material
and subject matter.” By this she also means that some poems are difficult to
get into because the language is too personal like a personal mythology. In the
poem “Inside An Hour:”
she was dead. Her halo hung in the
starry
starry night. She had finally done it
this time…
She was a heart stalled on a dare…
While
men want
“Something to be,” she needed to do
to
stop doing.
The second section of the book are thirty
poems written for each day for April 2021. Expecting a significant poem every
day, especially when their titles are given, is unrealistic. But a couple did
make the grade. In “Blood” Cervantes decries how justice is sometimes never
done, despite all forensic and preponderance of evidence to the contrary,
“There was blood evidence and still the culprit got away,” “There was the
smoking / revolver,” and the poem ends with “…we walk in beauty in shadow / of
the police. All hail the barrage of gunfire / upon us. All notice and hail of
blood / this time.”
The third section is just one poem,
written in the manner of “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg, called “Destination
Anywhere.” It fills six pages single-spaced. Where Ginsberg laments all the
best minds of
his generation lost to drugs or
insanity, Cervantes mourns the Chicana nation that is lost to “progress,” and
to a divided Nation.
In the fourth section of the, named “Sirens
of Olympia,” there is a poem “Night Magic (Blue Jester),” where Cervantes pays
tribute to the painter Carlos Almaraz and the Spanish poet Federico
Garcia-Lorca playing on the color blue rather than green as in Lorca’s
“Somnambular Ballad”:
Blue that I love you
Blue that I hate you
Fat blue in the face
Disgraced blue that I erase…
It is a wonderful display of
stream of conscious sonics.
There are many poems of longing in this
collection. Longing for justice, longing for better treatment, and longing for
the best kind of citizenship as in the very first poem of the collection
stating that “The River Does Not Want a Wall,” with obvious reference to the
wall that separates people north and south of the Mexican border, and finally
despite the shameful deeds of the oppressors, whoever they may be with whatever
first advantage they had, they cannot stop the people yearning for love, as in
“Sudden Song”:
I could know you
You gave me half a chance.
Half-wild in the drift of you,
half-child, why wait when the sun
dares the morning?
I honestly had trouble getting into this
book because it is not held back. Injustice is everyone’s
business.
But I could really expect anything less. For a poet to speak of centuries of
genocide and
relegation
to the worst of lands and urban areas, and denied their rightful place in
history, to have their
land
taken and still to sing, even in the oppressors’ language, this is courage,
something I can learn
instead
of glib tongues that amuse.
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