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RHINA P. ESPAILLAT, Playing at Stillness, Kirksville, MO, Truman State University Press 2005, pp. 105, $14.95.
In 2001 Rhina Espaillat won the Rich ard Wilbur award for her collection Rehearsing Absence. Espaillat has often stated her admiration for Wilbur’s poetry and it is easy to see similarities between the two poets. Both share a love of the opportunities offered by elaborate metrical and stanzaic forms and both have a keen eye for the miraculous within the quotidian, whether it be the joyful dance of a cloud of may-flies or the effects of October light on a man raking leaves. In this sense both could be described as essentially celebratory artists; Wilbur, in a recent poem, has declared that his «task is joyfully to see / How fair the fiats of the caller are».
Playing at Stillness contains an epithalamium poem For My Son on his Wedding Day; this provides the chance for a direct comparison with Wilbur, who wrote A Wedding Toast for his own son. Wilbur’s poem, naturally enough, testifies to his religious convictions, with its evocation of the miracle at Cana: «Now, if your loves will lend an ear to mine, / I toast you both, good son and dear new daughter. / May you not lack for water, / And may that water smack of Cana’s wine».
Espaillat’s poem is, instead, a tender declaration of a mother’s mixed feelings on such an occasion: «In your fisherman’s room, becalmed by loss, / I sit, thinking Yes hard while the heart cries No / whose love you landed, unfished-for, long ago». The fishing metaphor is extended throughout the poem, allowing her to evoke humorously the thankless duties of a mother («I cursed you with gloves and lunches and beliefs, / harpooned you with Don’ts, dragged anchor to your sail...»), while at the same time testifying touchingly to her natural sense of loss: «Now, beached as the tide goes out that bears away / both the man and the boy you were, what can I say?» It is a tribute to Espaillat’s delicacy of touch that she succeeds in lifting this metaphor to a higher level in the final rhyming couplet: «I wish you, too, beautiful sons and daughters, / and long, mi raculous fishing in quiet waters». Many of Espaillat’s strengths can be seen in this witty but quietly moving poem. There are all her formal skills and her emotional truthfulness. And there is her constant attention to affective ties.
Family bonds are a recurring theme in her poetry; in such poems as Cousins we hear of her extended family in the Dominican Republic, where she was born. Her gaze goes both backwards and forwards across the generations, recalling her par ents and celebrating her children and grandchildren. This volume contains two extremely moving poems on her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease, a theme she had dealt with in an earlier volume in one of the most poignant villanelles ever written («From hair to horse to house to rose, / her tongue unfastened like her gait, / her gaze, her guise, her ghost, she goes...»), in which the insistent repetends of the form evoke the sense of helplessness and imprisonment imposed by the illness. In this volume Espaillat chooses freer forms to deal with the subject, adopting striking enjambments, a complete absence of punctuation and broad gaps within the lines to express the dilemma of broken communication:
Today I am her
sisterShe tells me again
how proud she is of
My careful cutting
Naturally Espaillat’s love of forms can be seen elsewhere in the volume; the volume contains rhyming quatrains, sonnets, villanelles and sestinas. As always the forms are used to great effect; the repetends in the sestina People in Home Movies suggest beautifully the viewer’s (and all humanity’s) desire to recapture a lost past, to establish connections with the «bits and patches» of our memory. She skilfully evokes the blurred focus and ran dom movements of amateur home movies, and makes them an effective metaphor for our confused emotional relationship with our own past and with our memories of those close to us.
A key line comes in a sonnet cele brating the ritual and the haven of tea-time: «We learn nothing of ours is ours to keep». The poet, much concerned with affective ties broken by time, by geographical distance and by mind-destroying illnesses, testifies both to the sense of painful loss and to our unquenchable desire nonetheless to keep something from this world. What we keep need not necessarily be memories of world-shattering events; she has, like Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop, a wonderful sense of the homely and can find cause for celebration in the contents of a vegetable dish or a children’s kite. She also has a wonderful eye and ear for witty but highly suggestive metaphors, like the idea of the poem as a poor tramp or busker, who «looks over the trash / put out by the five senses – / those rich neighbors – // and uses what it can / like wool from an old sweater...».
The domestic, in Espaillat’s poetry as in Bishop’s, often borders on the epiphanic. A telling example is the poem that recounts the family’s attempts to capture (visually, that is) a raccoon in their garden: «We’ve got you now in the dusty beam that creeps / up the trunk after you, sweeps undersides / of leaves spread hands up like accomplices...».
The sense of triumph gives way to a sense of quiet awe in the final stanza, as the poet declares: «But it is you who hold us, mystery / blooming this once in our city maple, you / whose dainty fingers close on us like love / and neither take us with you nor let us go».
Gregory Dowling
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