Cantos to Blood and Honey:
Taste Joy!
Dateline: 1/27/98
And somewhere en el Barrio
two hands play a distant clave
Suddenly with a neighbor named Tito
joins with a bongó
pla-kee-plee pla-kee-plee-plak
Clave & bongó are speaking now
(It is quiet)
Then a few congas
join in the conversation
. . . . . . .
And somewhere on the Internet you plug your brainpan in and park your dance, read the words of new poet singing like a cucu and bopping flesh back to life. That’d be Cuba in your backyard, that’d be Miami floating pinks in your blues. That’d be Adrian Castro pumping the bandwidth to a conversation, and you are the participating aunt, the munching uncle, the cigar that lights the way.
Another boffo beauty from Coffee House Press, Cantos to Blood and Honey is perfecto, placed as it is between the formal and the spontaneous, the dire political beat and the sweet drip of life that flows through the dark. Let the languages salsa, the Spanish, the English, the dialects of Yoruba. Let the places transmigrate, the Cuba, the Mainland, the Miami, the Africa. And with a warm welcoming intro by forerunner Victor Hernandez Cruz (whose Panaramas was reviewed last week).
He adds the wá wá to Eleguá! This is “Crio-o-o-o-o-ollo!” “Calabash-sh-sh”!
And dear Poets who don’t know Perejil (Sp., parsley) from Kimbombó (Yoruba, okra) are directed to Glossary. Now many people feel there shouldn’t be Glossary in Poetry, so that the bilingualities are fully (un)appreciated by the monolingual. Castro is the opposite, giving a headlong push into his music, and room for a didactic approach to his work, which is play, which plays like a record, a history of myth, an inspiration.
Nicolás Guillén’s in his back pocket, everything is alive, is tattooed in the oral tradition. In other words: he’s just talkin to us. “What about Feyo, Frank, Emilio, Luis y Mongo” he asks, as if we will wait for them together, part of the gang. “And how can we forget Alfonsa y Atandá” and in his graceful ease, we cannot forget, as real as your next dance partner, your last lover. This in his poem “Mokongo y Tó Esa Gente,” which proclaims a (written, explicit) call and response, and a beat you must dance eyeballs to. In parentheses, all together now: “(It is quiet)”.
Because. Because does not exist, oooo. The quiet which precedes, was, and will follow. Spaces in the broken beat, the warp of time as the clave's meet,
“The Breeze Is Wind But the Hurricane Is Also Wind” builds from placid motionless calm to the explosion of a storm, a cascading symphony of language calling up Quincy Troupe’s Avalanche. Castro rides us right into the eye, where direct experience
His epitaph:
The last words of the book:
Adrian Castro’s book is a blessing, a dance. a performance, a ritual, a hurricane. Here’s the language mix that puts Miami in your eye -- taste joy!
--Bob HolmanA candle lit by Eleguá wá wá
the sounds thumped like a procession of feet
against the ear missing a snap--
relentless bombing
simmers down, flows back as tide into beach,
. . . . .
flying motorcycle
ghost-rides
into the side of a truck
. . . . .
queen of gust & grave
the price we pay
for living in paradise.
. . . I wrote a poem once
turned out to be my story.
In the beginning
un coco tumbled & split
into four pieces
their pulp pointed skyward
todo está bien
the story continues. . .
