{"id":7027,"date":"2013-12-12T06:00:57","date_gmt":"2013-12-12T11:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=7027"},"modified":"2013-12-11T11:10:03","modified_gmt":"2013-12-11T16:10:03","slug":"review-luisa-a-iglorias-the-saints-of-streets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2013\/12\/12\/review-luisa-a-iglorias-the-saints-of-streets\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Luisa A. Igloria’s THE SAINTS OF STREETS"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Saints of Streets <\/em>by Luisa A. Igloria<\/a> | University of Santo Tomas 2013 | $17<\/p>\n

\"the-saints-of-streets\"<\/p>\n

\u201cHokusai believed in the slow \/ perfectibility of forms\u201d (3), begins Luisa A. Igloria\u2019s newest book of poems, The Saints of Streets<\/em>. She has been writing a poem a day since 2010, a project archived online<\/a> and from which this collection was born. Given how prolific she is, I could not help but find in these opening lines a reassurance that the poems collected here are not merely practice but are a practice<\/em>. For perfectibility, the poem goes on to say, is \u201cthe way, \/\/ after seventy-five years or more, the eye \/ might finally begin to understand \/ the quality of a singular filament\u2014\u201d Indeed, this is a book of single filaments, and in these poems are so much delight and wisdom, often beginning in the mundane but nearly always spiraling inward to the sacred.<\/p>\n

We see this spiraling quality first of all in the poems about place, which is one of what I’ll call three clotheslines bending with this collection’s poems: clotheslines, I say, because of the quality the poet gives to everyday activity, weighted with meditations even as it flutters in the wind. The place poems nod most pronouncedly to the collection\u2019s title. In \u201cRepair,\u201d for instance, we begin in the present moment: \u201cAlmost at the alley\u2019s elbow, I know the gate . . .\u201d (9). Shortly after that, we move to the wistful past tense, each sentence beginning “There used to be” as a litany. Just as we first graze the alley as a kind of body, so does the speaker name the ghosts of objects as though in mortal lament, counting down structural losses, strippings, and repairs along with the absences of people. But the magic of this poem is in its concluding grammatical shift. See how, in the last three lines, the past tense makes way for something closer to the timeless:<\/p>\n

across the south wall, even on the night the child
\nran out the side door with bare feet, crying after the figure
\ndisappearing halfway up the rise, beyond the street.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Line by line we move from a definite point in time (\u201con the night\u201d), to an ongoing and simultaneous action (\u201cran out . . . crying\u201d), and finally to an image marked by its remove from the rest of the action (\u201cdisappearing . . . beyond\u201d). The medial caesura of each line helps us rhythmically, step by step, as do the definite articles. The final \u201cdisappearing\u201d is a present participle, non-finite: not quite past and not quite present. And that last image of what is \u201cbeyond the street,\u201d in its ghostly way, takes us through the longing into something even greater than the object of the longing, greater than the body of the street.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what I mean by the sacred; that\u2019s how Igloria\u2019s poems spiral into it. In \u201cDomicile,\u201d the next poem after \u201cRepair,\u201d she tells us: \u201cThis is the only way \/ to think of home sometimes\u2014before the blueprint\u201d (10), for this poem too peels away at surfaces to that history of things we cannot see, and of \u201cwhat we might bear \/ out of the ordinary darkness and the mud.\u201d On the next page comes the title poem, \u201cThe saints of streets,\u201d which gives us a history of place through names. It exposes geo-graphy<\/em>\u2014the writing of land\u2014with narrative legends, but rather than merely explaining as if the speaker were a tour guide, the poem questions:<\/p>\n

There used to be a waterfall<\/span>
\ncalled Bridal Veils<\/span>.<\/p>\n

In legend, a woman falls to her death.<\/span>
\n(Why always on the eve<\/span>
\nof nuptials?) (11)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The voice at first is factual, then seems wiser than the locals (\u201cBut there are no words for pole bean<\/em> here\u201d). But the voice really takes off when it becomes first-person plural, when we realize the emotional investment of this speaker who is connecting past with present, collective memory with individual memory, noticing the sound above \u201clike bombs on rooftops\u201d with, below, the \u201crows of stones under which all our dead lay sleeping.\u201d<\/p>\n

If continuity with the past (like the recurring motif of \u201cstrawflowers . . . that we called Everlasting<\/em>\u201d) occupies a large part of Igloria\u2019s poetics, it may be unsurprising that many of these poems also deal with time\u2019s divides in an immediate family; that is to say, poems of motherhood and poems of divorce. This is the second clothesline in the collection. In \u201cMeditation on a Seam,\u201d we get a personal history of the sacred, beginning with the early memory of two mothers\u2014\u201cshe who birthed, and she \/ who raised me\u201d (39)\u2014making clothes for other women through the night, and of one morning when the stunning image of a wedding dress hung in a doorway of light while the women \u201cknelt on the floor with pins \/ in their mouths, working round the hem.\u201d Much later in time, we\u2019re told: \u201cIn the dark, because of them I find \/ lost prayers in the tiny edging around buttonholes \/\/ in store-bought shirts.\u201d There is a tinge of elegy in the poem, which skirts around \u201cthe gathered dust and tears\u201d and yokes the image of seams (creases, pleats, edges) to reverence, prayer, closeness across time.<\/p>\n

A few poems later, we come to \u201cHorizon Note,\u201d which at first seems occasional in its random observations until the speaker realizes that her tone, \u201cunkind and full of remorse,\u201d is coming from an unrelated memory many years ago, the moment of meeting \u201cthe man bent on marrying [her]\u201d (46). She says, with a touch of wistful spite: \u201cI could almost believe I was \/ meant for something greater than this.\u201d Though the speaker is quite terse on the subject, the poem leads directly into the next, \u201cLittle Islands,\u201d which is less oblique about \u201cfifteen \/ years of marriage gone sour, a dried-up can of soda \/ someone left behind on the sand\u201d (47). As we move forward in the collection with poems that touch on this subject, the speaker becomes more forceful, more stolid in her own shoes. In \u201cWhat to Do with Suitors in the Courtyard,\u201d Igloria,\u00a0riffing on the image of Penelope waiting at home, writes:<\/p>\n

. . . I\u2019ve discovered something:<\/span>
\nI wouldn\u2019t have lasted a week with that loom.<\/span><\/p>\n

Faithless? Let me<\/em> tell you something. I could\u2019ve cleared
\nthat courtyard of pseudo admirers, interested only<\/span>
\nin what they could stuff in a sack. Annex me<\/span><\/p>\n

any way you want, but leave me alone. (67)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In \u201cManual,\u201d at the time of another marriage, while answering her six-year-old\u2019s question about relationships, the speaker yanks back her ex\u2019s chauvinist metaphor for marriage, \u201cA car has only one steering wheel\u201d (69). Wearier and warier now, yet buoyant in the charm and joy of the scene, she cuts with a last line that disrupts the poem\u2019s tercets: \u201cBut it helps if you know how to drive.\u201d<\/p>\n

This, and other poems of emancipation, are tracked and tempered by the presence of children. There is a fullness to the poet\u2019s vision in this collection because, in addition to\u00a0<\/span>horizontal relationships (which might otherwise have resulted in poems merely of anger) and the upward relationship of reverence (which might have resulted in merely devotional poems), there is also the downward relationship to a next generation. In \u201cZiggurats there aren\u2019t here, my sweethearts\u2014\u201d the speaker says: \u201cI wanted to give you \/ keepsakes that wouldn\u2019t tarnish: a wraparound porch, a swing, that \/ Jungian well cleared of debris at last . . .\u201d (68). This relationship goes beyond the literal relationship to one’s children. Woven through this book is a delicate care-taking. The good intentions may not meet their consummation in the poems: \u201cInstead,\u201d continues the above, \u201cI\u2019ve understood no more, no less than this wild \/ hunger . . .\u201d However, the intention itself is a mode of seeing, which is precisely what Igloria’s poetry offers best. That poem ends:<\/p>\n

. . . But
\ndon\u2019t think this is mere lamentation or elegy. I\u2019ve seen someone
\ncome to the lake faithfully each afternoon with a small
\nbag of crumbs for stray animals, just because
\naffliction has such a desolate color.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lastly, I see a clothesline of ghazal poems strung throughout the collection. The ghazal is an Arabic form of rhyming couplets with a refrain. It is a form which, like the sonnet, relies heavily on a volta just past the halfway point. In\u00a0this volta lies the poem\u2019s capacity to charge each repetition of a thing until it changes by some metamorphosis of feeling or understanding. For Igloria, in more than one instance, this is a literal change in the refrain itself\u2014for example, in \u201cGhazal: Some Ways to Live,\u201d the refrain of \u201clive\u201d morphs at the volta into \u201cgive\u201d (51). In \u201cMortal Ghazal,\u201d the first and most powerful of the set, a meditation on what is \u201ceverlasting\u201d morphs at the volta into what looks in the sky to be \u201cunrelenting\u201d (33). As in Bishop\u2019s \u201cOne Art,\u201d the force of the poem is built up to self-revelation at the end, and direct address, where this unrelenting lyric in praise of the everlasting is shown, finally, to be itself mortal and deeply vulnerable.<\/p>\n

Igloria\u2019s ghazal poems are best when the naturally abstract refrain lines are moved and buffered by narrative force. Though the ghazal appears here as a formal practice of meditation, like rosary beads to quietly obsess over, as yet it seems an inchoate form for Igloria\u2019s poetics\u2014and with some of these poems it can feel like including \u201cghazal\u201d in the title serves as a kind of explanation or apology for what ought to stand on its own.<\/p>\n

As a whole, this is a book of joyful energy distilled in wistful images and questions. I look very much forward to Igloria\u2019s next collection, which given her rate of writing must be hot on this one\u2019s heels. I\u2019ll end with some of my favorite lines, from \u201cBrood,\u201d a frenzied poem about a child running off or disappearing\u2014several times\u2014and the speaker finally contending, \u201c[o]n faith,\u201d with the wisdom of Rumi:<\/p>\n

But tell me what happens, after the snake has made its way<\/p>\n

up the trunk of the dead elm into a den of flickers, emerging later
\nwith a new bulge sleek in its black belly\u2014Except for the wind,<\/p>\n

and cries of birds that haven\u2019t learned anything but account
\nfor duty, nothing troubles the branches of the lilac trees. (27)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Saints of Streets by Luisa A. Igloria | University of Santo Tomas 2013 | $17 \u201cHokusai believed in the slow \/ perfectibility of forms\u201d (3), begins Luisa A. Igloria\u2019s newest book of poems, The Saints of Streets. She has been writing a poem a day since 2010, a project archived online and from which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[430,39,997],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7027"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7027"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7034,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7027\/revisions\/7034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}