Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Guest Review: Carmen Calatayud Reviews "the eaters of flowers"

 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


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