the eaters of flowers
by ire’ne lara silva
ISBN 979-8-9879541-2-6
Saddle Road Press, January 2024
Book Review by Carmen Calatayud
If a book of poems can be a love song to grief, then the eaters of flowers by Texas Poet Laureate ire’ne lara silva is that love song. In this case, the book-length love song is for the poet’s brother, who died in July 2022. Shortly after his death, silva poured out these poems that chronicle her journey of caregiving and communion with her brother during the 20 years they lived together, as well as her life after his death.
The poet’s brother Moisés adored plants and flowers, and it is this passion for the natural world that imbues the eaters of flowers. silva dives into the earth, lets it feed her and us as she navigates grief with all of her senses:
i will give you more flowers than you can eat push
them into your mouth with my mouth lick them into you thrust
them into the hollow of your chest curl them beneath your eyelids
whisper them over your skin until they dissolve into you
The themes of health, healing and the body are woven throughout the book, both the poet’s and her brother’s, along with their family history. These poems, prose-like and lyrical, are rich, detailed stories about the physical and emotional ramifications of a broken heart, diabetes and cancer. These are not poems living on the surface of life. They dare to go deep quickly. The poem entitled poem for my kidneys begins with a summation:
this starts as a poem for my kidneys but as you’ll see it will rapidly
become a poem about mortality maybe really everything is about mortality
because i’m not sure we can really be serious about anything unless death
is part of the equation…..
Death is ever present in these poems, as is grief, but silva communicates her acceptance of death as a natural part of our lives. It is this belief, present throughout the book, which strengthens us. The poet writes about how mother referred to her dead in the diminutive, mis muertitos, and transmits her mother’s teaching about death:
my mother knew no distant
way to think of her ancestors
or her beloved dead
i think she would have had
compassion for those who are
awkward in the face of grief
awkward because
grief hasn’t yet visited them
or because they weren’t taught
and they don’t know
or cannot accept that death
is not the opposite of life
only the next part
the next world
the doorway we’ll all enter
silva deepens her examination of the spiritual throughout these poems, injecting us with the power to heal by letting us know there is no boundary between the physical and the spiritual:
medicine lives under my skin and in my eyes and in
my tongue and in my breath i know how to make
medicine i speak medicine i walk medicine i am
becoming i am making myself medicine
All of these poems are free of punctuation, and in silva’s case, some of them don’t stop for breath. That is part of what makes each poem a conversation with us, or an ongoing soliloquy that we are eavesdropping on.
In the poem Lot K32, silva writes about the burial plots she and her brother bought together and what it’s like for her to visit him there, among the trees, wild grass and butterflies:
i took care of him
for all but seven years of his life
in the afterlife there will be
no need to look after each other
his spirit in the unfurling
of all green things and the dew
is free of all pain and memory
and mine will return to the wind
as free as it ever dreamed of being
but here beneath this earth
we will never leave each other
we will be siblings of the soil
As this book is a love song to grief, there must be singing. We get direct evidence of this book as song in the poem silence is the breath between songs, which opens with the poet’s definition of singing:
Singing is inviting all the ghosts all of my dead to sing
The book closes with a poem responding to the tragic events at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde on May 24, 2022. Texas Highways Magazine commissioned silva to write the poem, and in her introduction to the poem, she tells us that this is the last poem she read to her brother, who was her first and most important editor, before he died.
i don’t know where mothers hold their grief
or fathers or children or friends or neighbors or even
strangers who in this shared hurt are no longer strangers
our chests are not large enough can’t hold this roiling of
heat of fire of confusion this churning of fear of rawness
of emptiness
are tears enough are flowers enough are songs enough
The cover of the eaters of flowers must be mentioned, as it features a striking painting (what the artist calls a frontexto) entitled puño de flores by former San Antonio Poet Laureate and artist Octavio Quintanilla. Her poem, after the painting, is also called puño de flores. At a recent poetry reading in San Antonio, silva described the painting’s flowers with orange stems as having been carried for hours in someone’s fist, which eventually withered the flowers and left the heat of the hand on the stems. In this description of the art, and in her poem, we see how the poet understands what we do for love.
silva weaves grief with the stems of flowers into a wreath that crowns her brother and all of our lost loved ones. Through these accessible and vulnerable poems, nuestros muertitos are moving. In the eaters of flowers, they dance, sing, weep and love across fields that burst and bloom.
== Meet the Reviewer
Carmen Calatayud is the daughter of immigrants: A Spanish father and Irish mother. Her book In the Company of Spirits was a runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award and a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Her poetry has recently appeared in Rogue Agent and Tahoma Literary Journal, and was nominated for a 2023 Best of the Net Award.
Carmen is a Larry Neal Poetry Award winner and a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow. Her book This Tangled Body will be published by FlowerSong Press in collaboration with Letras Latinas in Spring 2024.
https://www.press53.com/carmen-calatayud
These flowers are beautiful and iridescent.
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