Pieces of Shadows

If simple delight is a rare thing in contemporary American poetry, here is an abundance of it in Sabines' first Spanish-English collection. Like cherries or roses Sabines' poems – often only a few lines long – contain little variety, but are exquisite. Sabines has been publishing poetry in his native Mexico since his first book Horal in 1950, and although he has influenced major American poets such as Mark Strand and W.S. Merwin, he has enjoyed little attention from an American readership. Sampling poetry from ten of Sabines' published works, Merwin's admirably straightforward translations capture in English much of the quiet presence of the original Spanish. Composed by Sabines in his twenties, poems in the first three sections (about half the collection) tend to suffer from overabstraction: "In you my heart grew. / In you my anguish was formed. / Beloved, place where I come to rest, / silence in which I suffer" (49). The themes of Sabines' early work couldn't be more perennial: hope (67), death (73), love (49), the "heart of man" (65). Still, in these early lines one can see a poet for whom the reality of emotion is crucial, and who wants to tell his stories without pretense. With Tarumba (103) Sabines breaks into a more fearless mode, perhaps having followed his own creative advice: "You have to act everything. / You have to break your head every day / on a stone, for the water to flow" (117). From this point on Sabines' wisdom certainly flows; he begins to describe in fuller detail his life in a Mexican city, returning again and again to the prose-poem form. Though the imagery grows more sophisticated, Sabines' vigorous clear-headedness gives his more mature poems the economy of his earliest work: "At midnight, at the last moment of August, I think sadly about the leaves that keep falling from the calendars. I feel that I am the tree of calendars" (133). Finally poems about watching television (171) and buying a luxury car (195) show Sabines in his stride, examining the things of his world with open eyes. This is an important collection, a vital addition to the body of 20th-century Mexican poetry in English. (April)

–Aaron Belz, 2/96
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