cover image Garden of Exile: Poems

Garden of Exile: Poems

Aleida Rodriguez. Sarabande Books, $12.95 (96pp) ISBN 978-1-889330-33-4

Neither especially ground-breaking nor ambitious, Rodr guez's debut nevertheless has charms: some inhere in its Spanish-and-English felicities, others emerge from the life story the poems tell. Having fled, at age nine, her native Cuba, Rodr guez is now an inquisitive bilingual lesbian freelance writer in Los Angeles. Her frequent meditations on words and languages can become both precious and self-righteous: she sighs, ""how difficult it is to work with words,"" and declares, ""This pitch/ of mine has dictatorial tones but made/ of nobler stuff, I hope, if it teaches/ that those who can, do, and those who can't, bitch."" Rodr guez offers a smorgasbord of forms, among them sonnets, a sestina, a shaped poem, a recipe-poem (""Risotto Ariosto""), and prose poetry. Her free-verse cadence suggests Elizabeth Bishop's, while her unobtrusive formal versatility and her political interests link Rodr guez to Marilyn Hacker, who selected this book for publication. In the poems that mix English and Spanish, Rodr guez proves most impressive when she refuses to translate for us, instead creating high-speed collisions between cultures and languages. At ""The Rosario Beach House,"" the poet's aunt ""en su gordura floated in the water/ como un globo o una ballena."" Rodr guez also infuses magic realism to great effect in her prose-poem series ""Little Cuba Stories/Cuentos de Cuba."" Exciting at times, the book seems better in parts than it does as a whole. Its forms, like its eroticism, can be as sensual as ""an anklet of blooming salal dances""; elsewhere the poems can turn as dull as ""the mainland... so undramatic / so flatly familiar.""(Oct.)