POETRY
Carmen Tafolla, edited by Bryce Milligan
Hardcover, 978-0-87565-689-2, 96 pp., $19.95
Texas A&M University Press
TCU Texas Poets Laureate Series
June 15, 2018
Reviewed by Natalia Treviño
The first burst of delicacies in Carmen Tafolla’s New and Selected Poems. A tribute to her accomplishments, roots, and activism by Bryce Milligan. The sweets that waterfall out? Eclectic, sensuous, and unabashed poetics of a fierce Chicana.
As I read this collection, I was reminded how fortunate I am to live in the city whose praises she frequently sings and whose sorrows and injustices she laments. This is one of the bright piñatas in this book for San Antonio readers, but the big prize goes to a much wider population. Needed in a time filled with such negative rhetoric about immigrants and Mexicans, this book feeds its readers pride in their cultura, in its Indigenous wisdom from the voice of a nurturer-mother Earth: “I have squeezed cilantro into the breast milk/ made sure you were nurtured with the taste / of green life.”
“Sassy as salsa,” this books teaches that we can “sashay” as we “sizzle on the streets,” offering an alternative to the narrative of despair and inferiority that is often sold to the world about Indigenous peoples, Mexicans, and Mexican-Americans. Reminding me of Zora Neale Hurston in its joy and celebration in representing the wholeness of her culture, Tafolla honors la gente, los viejitos, las viejitas, la curandera, as the “storykeepers” who are pushed aside. “Look in the jarros. / The ones forgotten or shoved aside,” she says, in a poem subtitled “Instructions from a historian.” Pride sings too, in the music of a third language born in Texas, Tex-Mex: “But even then I loved the octopus arms of my mother language, /Tex-Mex, // to be deste lado y dese lado.”
Divided into six sections that span almost five decades (six full-length collections), it begins with “New Poems,” a series of elegiac lyrics that explore a range of painful memories with an eye to wholeness and healing. Acknowledging the paradox that transcends breast cancer and the recent loss of “the one who brung me,” her beloved husband, we enter grief tempered by love: “yes, even the scars/change, soften, stretch and curve to fit/together.”
These new poems pick up a thread that shimmers in earlier works: the primordial voice and unmistakable presence of the Earth Mother: “I hear the earth softwhisper / Soy tu Madre, Mi’ja.” Like a turquoise thread woven into a colorful rebozo, with its wise suspiros, the goddess assists the reader to face los problemas: poverty, hunger, death, and racism with an alternative healing force: “This river here is full of me and mine // washing clean our memories, baptizing our hearts/ gathering past and present.” But this giving Earth-Mother is not shut away or romantically idealized, but alive, vulnerable, and palpable, a victim of horrid crime: “the planet herself. . . / torn from her organs / Womb and lungs and colon bleeding,” a Coyolxuaqui figure indeed, “as the violator curses, /under his money-drunk breath, / Frack You!”
Unabashed and lyrical, this political and personal book does not lie. Nor is it bathed in cynicism, but a much stronger force: love.
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