![]() ![]() Holding his mother and promising to return though he knows he never will, visiting his father’s grave for the last time, saying goodbye to his husband who cannot go with him. “Dawn breaks my window and dares me to write a poem brave enough to imagine the last day I’ll ever see this amber light…” He imagines losing “the spring giggles of my brook,” “the scent of my peonies or pillows.” He imagines the heartbreak of the day of departure, experiencing everything for the last time. Finally putting down roots in Maine, he imagines the fterrible losses of exile. Almost grown, searching for a life, a place where he belonged, he moved to New Orleans, then Hartford, DC, New York. ![]() When he wanted to play with the girls, his family was ashamed and punished him, other boys picked on him. ![]() His childhood in Miami was rich with Cuban culture, but he was always an outsider. When even though television brought images of war, “fantasy was still all I could believe of country.” As he grew older and learned the history of exploitation, brutality, injustice, “forgiveness became my country.” “I stayed, you stayed, we stayed for all the boys and girls returning as heroes, some without legs or arms…” for the Challenger disaster, the twin towers, the children in Sandy Hook, the people waiting for rescue in New Orleans after Katrina, “…feeling what we’ve always felt: to know a country takes all we know of love.” “When all I knew of country was a song and a book“ – the wonderful pictures of pilgrims in buckled boots, founders in wigs with quill pens, “When what I knew of country was only what I read from a map”- the vast land of mountains and rivers and cities he’d never seen. In “What I Know of Country” he traces his love as he grew up. He imagines how it was for his mother leaving Cuba, and wonders at her fierce love for her new country – “to love a country as if you’ve lost one.” W hen they visit DC s he tells him, “You know, mijo, it isn’t where you’re born that counts, it’s where you choose to die – that’s your country.” He sang America the Beautiful in church with his mother – “…we sang our thanks to our savior for this country that saved us.” At the family’s first Fourth of July parade he sang for spacious skies “closer to those skies while perched on my father’s sun-beat shoulders.” He loves his country, “I still want to sing despite all the truth of our wars and our gunshots ringing louder than our school bells, our politicians smiling lies at the mic…” “Destined to live with two first languages, two countries, two selves, and in the space between them all.” From these dualities comes compelling poetry. In his author’s note at the end of the book, he tells us, “…as the first latinx, immigrant, and gay man” in that role, he realized that his story “…is and has always been, a grand part of our country’s historical narrative.” Born in Madrid to Cuban immigrants, who moved to Miami when he was less than two months old, he is torn between the Cuban he imagines, and the American he is. Richard Blanco was the inaugural poet at Obama’s second inauguration. In a time when I, like many others, am frightened by the state of our world and our country, grieving at the evil done with our dollars and in our names, this book spoke to me. But like music, poetry can speak straight to the heart. Though I took one poetry course in college, I remember very little about technical matters, such as the different forms and meters, so it may be presumptuous for me to review a book of poetry. I just print the poems I like and save them in a three-ring notebook. I don’t linger long over the many poems that remain obscure even after I puzzle over them, that seem to contain secrets known only to the poet.
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