Memories of the Future: The Daybooks of Tina Modotti

by Margaret Gibson

Tina Modotti, know to a few as the beautiful Italian actress in Erich von Stroheim's silent film Greed, was also a dedicated political activist and photographer whose best work has a powerful dignity and integrity. She lived with Edward Weston in postrevolutionary Mexico in the 1920s. During the Spanish Civil war in the 1930s she was a nurse in Madrid and on various fronts. In Spain she knew Antonio Machado and Pablo Neruda, who wrote a poem about her after her death in Mexico in 1942. Margaret Gibson's Memories of the Future is based on Modotti's vivid but enigmatic life. Drawn from daybooks that Gibson imagines Modotti to have kept at the end of her life in Mexico City, these poems give us the reflections of a woman whose intensity and vision, evident in her own photographs, are matched by the depth and breadth of her experience and personal transformation in times of deep social and political upheaval.If we could look into the future, would we gothere?In the spiral of hunger's discontent, would we go?Somehow we go. New societies are bornmuch wider than our minds. And if for a momentwe doubt, our bodies remember. They believe.We make our bodies available to death,and therefore live. It is the hero's way-every woman knows it. In their attention to beauty and sensuality, light and detail, these poems capture the life of the photographer. In their unhesitating confrontation with pain and loss, they reveal the harsh realities of revolutionary life. Memories of the Future skillfully unfolds the political and artistic consciousness of a woman of sensibility and strong beliefs. It is a major new effort from one of America's best young poets.

Genres: Poetry

52 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1986

About the author

Margaret Gibson is the author of ten books of poems and one prose memoir. A native of Virginia, now a resident of Preston, Connecticut, she is a nationally and internationally recognized poet. She has received numerous honors, including the Connecticut Book Award and the Melville Kane Award, and her collection The Vigil was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry.

Reviews

[Alexandra Terlesky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Wow wow wow. Love.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my FAVE poetry books!

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry (adult)
The preface and notes help the reader gain a greater understanding of the work

[Duda Rotta · Rating 2 out of 5]

ok ficção histórica bla bla bla mas pq INVENTAR que o pai dela abusava dela???? oi???
e as palavras soltas em espanhol... como ja diriam os sábios do twitter: tacar bosta nessa branca

[Aleesha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm pretty sure I picked this book up at a reading. I was lucky enough to be able to see Margaret Gibson in person while I was a student in college.

I can't say that a great many of these works stayed with me--a lot of her poetry came across as dense. And while I enjoyed them while I read them, I didn't find myself thinking about it once I closed the book.

I don't know what that means. I can recognize and praise the talent, but I can also state that this wasn't perhaps as relevant and interesting to me as I might have liked.