Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Providential by Colin Channer

2016; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 90; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2016.0115

1945-8134

Keith Garebian,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Absolute from his everyday world, taking him—as a Nuevomexicano—to a heritage woven with threads from different world cultures (“Poetry unites. Poetry connects,” Anaya affirms). Words such as “sacred,” “soul,” and “the Absolute” appear in Anaya’s preface and poems as tacit challenges for the reader to rethink and reconceptualize —from one’s secularized and unbelieving vantage point—the possibilities and experiences latent in a language of transcendence we have all but forgotten. Originally titled “Songs of the Río Grande” and written over more than two decades, the collected twenty-eight poems stream like the days of a lunar cycle, fateful and varying in themes and moods from a wistful meditation on the poet’s epitaph (“Last Wish”) and a humorous but cautionary fable against drugs (“Beware the ChupaCabra”) to travels with his late wife, Patricia. Other poems refer to legends , myths, and poetic traditions from Egypt, Japan, and Mesoamerica; one poem is a parody of Western classics (Virgil’s Aeneid), sung with Nuevomexicano humor; another in particular, “Elegy on the Death of César Chávez,” mourns the death of the Chicano union organizer. The poems also allude to one of Anaya’s early novels, Tortuga (1979), in which the eponymous main character inherits Crispín’s guitar and accepts from Salomόn his destiny as a guitarrero, a singer of corridos (ballads). As the elderly version of Tortuga, Anaya strums and sings about righteous heroes, village storytellers, communal food, and the flow of water in fragrant orchards. These poems portray a world that young Mexican Americans, for the most part, have not seen, known, or tasted. Cultural identity and a sense of self can never be the result of a willful confinement, nor of a break from one’s past and a frontier’s new beginning, Anaya seems to say. Poems from the Río Grande consists of poetry that sings of an other America, one that instead of seeking safety in isolation discovers in all rivers of the world—the Nile, the Ganges, the Río Grande—the natural setting for the rise and innovative vitality of a civilization. Mexican American cultural history surges and whirls underground in Anaya’s poetry and narrative, and it is to this all-encompassing river that one must periodically return to drink. Roberto Cantú California State University, Los Angeles Colin Channer. Providential. Brooklyn, New York. Akashic Books, 2015. 103 pages. Born in Jamaica to a pharmacist mother and a policeman father, Colin Channer, an award-winning Caribbean diaspora writer in the US, has published a debut poetry collection exploring some of the often-violent complexities and confusions of colonial modernity. Channer recognizes that his home place is a land that “feels volcanic, / eruptive in the way of newish nations / built on old foundations of violence, / geographies where genocide and massacre / hang like smoke from coal fires, / mosquito nets.” Having had a policeman father (“employed by the landful against the landless”) also meant further exposure to violence— Salvador Novo Confetti-Ash Trans. Anthony Seidman & David Shook Bitter Oleander Press This collection of poetry allows the English reader to catch a glimpse of an important Mexican poet who contributed to the modernist movement of the early twentieth century, often restricted to European and American works. Evoking Pound, Novo creates images that summon moments of emotion while denying strict forms and conventions. Amélie Nothomb Pétronille Trans. Alison Anderson Europa Editions The sharp, acerbic voice of the narrator (who shares the same name as the author) frames her Parisian world through her love for champagne and desire to find a companion with whom to drink it. The relationship she forms with Petronille not only induces humorous scenes and reflections, but the tale as a whole questions the relationship of authors to their work and the tensions and pain that intimacy can create. Nota Bene WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 101 conditioned in large part by British colonialism —but the poet doesn’t merely turn his book into a chronicle of violence (although there are anecdotal poems about murder and rape); he turns it into a personal journey into areas of history and class, clans and nation, family and fatherhood. Although Channer’s poetry (like Claude...