Marilyn Monroe, and other poems

by Ernesto Cardenal

English, Spanish (translation)

Genres: Poetry

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Reverend Father Ernesto Cardenal Martínez was a Nicaraguan Catholic priest, poet, and politician. He was a liberation theologian and the founder of the primitivist art community in the Solentiname Islands, where he lived for more than ten years (1965–1977). A former member of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas (he left the party in the early 1990s), he was Nicaragua's minister of culture from 1979 to 1987.

His earlier poems focused on life and love. However, some works, such as "Zero Hour," had a direct correlation to his Marxist political ideas, being tied to the assassination of guerrilla leader Augusto César Sandino. Cardenal's poetry also was heavily influenced by his unique Catholic ideology, mainly liberation theology. Some of his later works were heavily influenced by his understanding of science and evolution, though still in dialogue with his earlier Marxist and Catholic material.--excerpted from Wikipedia

Reviews

[Zuberino · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume may be regarded as a comprehensive introduction to the pre-revolutionary work of the lately dead poet. It is by necessity a somewhat mixed bag of a collection, lacking in the coherence of Nicaraguan New Time which I read last week. This is not surprising because NNT deals with not only a much shorter timeframe but also one overriding theme - that of the Sandinista uprising and its eventual rise to power. By contrast, Marilyn Monroe covers much broader ground, from the poet's early work all the way through seminary school in three different countries and then finally to the island refuge of Solentiname, where the poet is just coming into revolutionary consciousness as the volume draws to a close, i.e., an acceptance of the need for violent struggle in order to upend the existing exploitative order in Latin America.

In here, you will find the epigrams (shorter than short) and the psalms (famously updated and totally communist), but it was other types of poems that drew me most. Firstly, the painterly portraits of Central America in early poems like "Omagua", "Above the rain-soaked track", and "Childhood in Leon". Further evocations in "Lost Cities" and "Vale of Cuernavaca" and "Managua 6.30 pm", visits to the colonial past ("Destruction of Santiago de Quauhtemalan") and even further back into pre-Columbian times in the series of beautiful poems that close out the book. The utter mutual incomprehension, total and fatal, between European and Indian has never been better captured than in "Tahirassawichi in Washington". Whole history books compressed in a single poem.

And that deathless title poem, the first few lines of which can leave you gasping for breath, at its profound sorrow and sympathy. Cardenal is a wonderful poet, and I am happy at last to have made a proper acquaintance.

[Isabel Tolentino · Rating 4 out of 5]

En realidad, 4.5

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recuerdos de mis clases de literatura, como estudiante

[4ileentz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read it in a bookstore and it was so pretty