Crossing the line
Poems inspired by life on both sides of the US-Mexican border open doors to understanding
Norma Elia Cantú says that writing “Meditación Fronteriza, Poems of Love, Life and Labor” was a rewarding and inspiring experience.
Readers of Cantú’s debut poetry collection can easily apply the same two adjectives to themselves. The book is a gift.
When taken as a whole, the poems present an expansive view of life past and present along the U.S.-Mexican border.
“In my whole life, I’ve been going back and forth,” Cantú said in a phone interview.
The plenitude of her perspectives — familial, historical, cultural, ethnographic, political — brings a fresh understanding of the border.
A few of the poems add a realistic bilingual flavor.
These are bilateral perspectives Cantú is familiar with. Born in the Mexican border town of Nuevo Laredo, she was raised in Laredo, Texas. Her father was from northern Mexico, her mother from Corpus Christi, Texas.
The first poem in this stunning collection is “Canto a La Tierra Fronteriza” and is followed by the English translation, “Song of the Borderland,” revealing a tender familiarity: “My land is a borderland/piece of my heart/land where the Carrizo, Comecrudos, the Coahuiltecos/crossed rivers/celebrated spring/suffered winter/they lived … they died.”
Cantú holds an endowed chair in the humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She’s a scholar whose writing is down-to-earth.
At 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 17, at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, 1701 Fourth SW, Cantú will lecture on her oeuvre and read from the poetry collection and from the second two novels of an unfinished trilogy –– “Canícula,” a Premio Aztlan-winning coming-of-age story, and the recently published “Cabañuelas,” a love story with other elements.
UNM Press’ Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series recently published these two collections -––RennyGolden’s “The Music of Her Rivers: Poems” and Barbara Rockman’s “to cleave: poems.”
The river in the first half of Golden’s book is the Rio Grande. Her poems address the river as living symbols of border and bridge, a bridge between cultures.
The poems tell stories set in, near or distant from the river. One poem references Juan de Oñate’s soldiers’ 1599 punitive attack on Acoma Pueblo, another describes “the holy season when (ancient Cochiti Pueblo dancers) dress with the river’s gifts –– turtle shells, feathers,” and yet another poem captures a vision of snowmelt in the river’s headwaters in the San Juan Mountains and then shifts south, telling of a Salvadoran youth desperate for the river to deliver him.
The second half of Golden’s book (“Chicago — Illinois Rivers”) is a mix of personal experiences and reportage of Chicago’s political history that reach back to, among other subjects, the French founding of the city, a race riot 100 years ago and the cultures of its immigrants (Irish, Polish, Mexican). The book’s rivers can also be viewed as witnesses to injustice.
The poems of Rockman, a Santa Fe resident, are a rainbow of observations of moments from her life, from nature, and from historical figures.
One poem –– “Letter from Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz on Seeing His Photograph of Her Hands” –– concludes with the rhetorical question, “What can a man know of a woman’s hands?”
Another poem, titled “Raven,” finds Rockman composing a playful portrait of the bird: “Who knows/what they’re scheming behind sleek brows/and indented chests.”