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5.5 x 8.5 ISBN 0-9717265-6-6 (paper) $16.95
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"IN THE POST OFFICE TEARS PILE UP, UNOPENED"
---Marieve Rugo
If In Your Country
He still works at the grain elevator
in Topeka. Pushes a grain shovel
all week, drinks away Saturday,
goes to late mass on Sunday.
She never heard from him,
for these twenty-some years a spinster.
He emigrated to America, was
to send for her when he got settled.
In 1949 he wrote he’d found work,
would send her passage.
But the village postman was given to drink
and forgetful. When he died in 1971
the shocked villagers found
dozens of letters stashed
behind the desk, slipped into corners.
Her long awaited letter like the rest
Undelivered, unopened...
Sean’s address in America blurred
from the damp of the Post and Telegraph.
Maeve’s name faded from his memory
by the Kansas sun.
ALIVE, ALIVE OH!
--for Tonja Larsen and Judy Fisher
At the bar words in Irish
sough between publican and customer.
He looks our way, a fisherman up
since six this morning,
abandons his half-finished pint.
Foam slides down the glass
like the tide falling away
from the stone quay a mile from here.
Uncertain of his landlegs, he staggers
away toward hearth.
We finish Guinnesses at our ease,
return to the carpark.
A man sells mussels from a burlap bag
out the boot of his car.
On the road through Letterfrack village
the freshly laid tarmacadam sizzles:
smoke and fog burn away
the soft evening sky.
What I love about this collection is that it catches perfectly that special sense of rural Ireland which might be described as mixture of raw satirical humour, tragedy, and a kind of yearning for love and connection in a society that feels a constant tension between materialism and spirituality. At the Edge of the Western Wave is a big and sweeping enough collection to be able to accomodate these themes and their nuances: I'm constantly amazed at the way in which Reyes can present a small detail--a shop-front, a "wink" of light, an Hiberno-English phrase, a name, a place name--and evoke a whole way of life.
What's even more important, though, is that there's a clear sense of Reyes as a poet making his way through the shoals of Irish sensibility, first as a stranger with a stranger's alert, even amazed, eye, but later as someone who has become strangely at home in the west of Ireland, but still not losing his alertness for the lyricism of the quotidian. This is a very impressive book.
--Ger Killeen
  | Carlos Reyes is a long-time noted Portland poet, writer and translator. Most recent book of poetry: A Suitcase Full of Crows (1995). Forthcoming poetry from Lost Horse Press in Spring 2004: At the Edge of the Western Wave. Books of translations: Poemas de la Isla/Island Poems by Josefina de la Torre (Eastern Washington University Press, 2000); Puertas abiertas/Open Doors by Edwin Madrid (2000), Hojas sueltas/Scattered Leaves by Josefina de la Torre (2002) and Páginas de Arena/Pages of Sand by Selena Millares (2003). Of interest is the fact that Open Doors has been translated into Arabic and this year was published in Baharain. Reyes has completed translating the Obra poética completa (Complete Poetic Works) of the preeminent Ecuadorean poet Jorge Carrera Andrade, which will be published this year in a bilingual edition in Ecuador. Current translation project: Mario Benedetti, Rincón de los haiku / Corner of Haikus. Publisher/Editor Trask House Books, Inc. Former poetry reviewer for Willamette Week, a weekly newspaper in Portland, Oregon. He travels often to Ireland where he maintains an 18th century Irish cottage and is a frequent visitor to Spain and Ecuador. |
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