Poetry Readers Challenge discussion
2014 Reviews
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Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral
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Excellent! I always enjoy the winners of The Yale Series of Younger Poets. Many of the winners are relatively obscure, which is sad. They seem to uncover some of the finest poets. I'm going to look for this one. The Spanish language is so beautiful. I don't see how anyone can be deterred by that. Since I live in Texas, it's quite common to have this "peppering", and I think it only enhances language in general.
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Jenna, thanks for the terrific review. Now I want to buy the book!
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Jenna wrote: "I haven't read many of the latter-day Yale winners: I think the last one that I picked up, bought, and read from cover to cover was Cathy Song's Picture Bride (1982). In paging through other recent..."The reason I got into poetry was coming across this book one day in a used bookstore, Hands of the Saddlemaker, which won the Yale prize in 1992. I literally read the whole collection while standing in middle of the store. This was about 4 years ago. It opened up my eyes to the unbounded possibilities of language. I need to read some Carl Phillips as well.
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And thanks for commenting as well, Jen and Nina. I hope you'll check him out.
-E. Corral, from "Poem After Frida Kahlo's Painting 'The Broken Column'"
Like many, I first encountered Eduardo C. Corral's work via Poetry Magazine, which first began publishing his poetry in its December 2011 issue. However, it was the experience of hearing him read aloud from his masterful three-part sonnet sequence "Border Triptych" that convinced me I needed to buy his Yale-Prize-winning debut book, Slow Lightning.
If you decide to read Slow Lightning, "Border Triptych" is a good place to start, as it's probably the most accessible work in this collection: a collage of three relatively straightforward narrative poems that deal with the politically charged topic of Mexico-to-U.S. immigration in an intimate, savvy way, not shying away from either the horror or the humor in the complex situations they interrogate. The rest of the book is stranger, more surreal, more experimental in its approach to forms, and more difficult overall to classify. While Slow Lightning is much more than merely a "topical" book, a number of recognizable topics do surface repeatedly in these shimmering poems, including: gay male love, the looming shadow of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Mexico-to-U.S. border crossings, and anti-Latino racism. This last ranges from microaggressions ("In graduate school a landlord asked,/Here to pick strawberries?") to state-sanctioned violence ("Josefa Segovia was tried, convicted & hanged on July 5, 1851, in Downieville, California, for killing an Anglo miner, a man who the day before had assaulted her").
There is much to admire about the language with which these weighty topics are treated. Sometimes Corral's verbal virtuosity manifests as a concise, almost-aphoristic wit: "In high school I worked as a bag boy. To prevent shoplifting my boss/had me follow the Mexicans & the Native Americans who came in to shop./I was slightly troubled by this. So I only followed the handsome men." Other times, when Corral flexes his linguistic muscles, the result is an instance of shatteringly gorgeous imagery: "Kahlo undresses in front of a mirror./Her spine: a pouring of sand/through an hourglass/of blood."
Though many of the poems in Slow Lightning are perfectly effective as stand-alone works of art, this is overall a collection that benefits from being judged as a synergistic whole. A single short poem like "Want," when evaluated on its own, may not be an entirely convincing argument for the parallels between parental suffering and youthful desire, but it becomes more powerful when viewed in the context of other poems on related subjects, like the delightful "Ditat Deus."
Other reviewers have made much of the fact that Corral liberally peppers his English poems with Spanish words and phrases. As a long-time student of French, I was able to figure out the meanings of most of these words and phrases with the help of context clues. Occasionally, though, a quick trip to Google was needed to make sense of an obscure-to-me Mexican cultural reference or a slangy/colloquial Spanish expression. Please do not let Corral's use of Spanish deter you from reading this book. These poems are rewarding even if you don't take the time to Google every Spanish word (though they are even more rewarding if you do). I don't exaggerate when I say this is the best debut I have read in a very long time. It will inspire you to write, and to think; it will inspire you to make mental connections and feel sympathies you hadn't felt before. It will enrich you.