A flawed but necessary history of a culture whose voices demand to be heard.
Engle merges streams of free-verse poetry into a Hispanic history lesson spanning centuries.
Beginning on the shores of pre-Colombian Borikén (Puerto Rico), Engle imagines the voices of the Taíno as well as those of the colonizers and many diverse mestizos from across the Hispanic Americas to craft a poetic picture of Hispanic history that begins with a trickle and ends in a torrent. The author does not hide her point of view. She paints an idealized picture of Taíno culture—the only explicitly Indigenous voices represented—in which people lived in harmony with the land before the arrival of the Spaniards, a choice that elides the complicated history of the pre-Columbian Americas. As the story continues into the modern day, the featured characters demonstrate the wide variety of ethnic roots included in the multicolored tapestry of Hispanic culture, but there is not so much diversity in thought, as it largely celebrates those stories that align with contemporary liberal ideology. The retrospective look back reveals many narratives that seem to play on a loop as similar struggles are faced by successive generations and continue to this day, begging readers to learn from the past lest it repeat yet again. Within the authorial bias, the poetry is fluid and thought-provoking, and Latinx readers will find many narrative threads that will seem teased from their own family looms.
A flawed but necessary history of a culture whose voices demand to be heard. (Poetry anthology. 10-14)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62779-531-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Godwin Books
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Forbes tenders a curiously wayward collection of animal love poetry.
“For soon they’ll grow up and want to go play / With game skunky guys for a sniff and a spray.” Sure, if educated fleas do it, then skunks do it: They fall in love. But Cole Porter might have framed it differently, as it seems a little rich for 7-year-olds, the starting audience for which this book is disingenuously pegged in its marketing: 7 to 70. Elsewhere, readers will find “a pig whose name is Squig,” a “camel named Kim” and a “doe gazelle named Mellow”—not to forget “[t]wo raccoons, Liz and Rick” (whose name suddenly turns to Dick in the last stanza), none of whom will tickle too many 60-year-olds. And for such a handsome production—the paper is lovely, and the reproductions of Searles’ illustrations, with their wonderful spidery, anarchic linework and trails of color that leave afterimages, are terrific—it is jarring to find “unfatihfulness” and “morning dove” (though the last occurs in one of the better poems, about a sea gull leaving home—the beach—because he is tired of the soggy French fries). Of the 27 poems here, Forbes best hits his stride in the longer pieces, especially “Down at the Old Mill Inn,” with its cast of unsavories kept in check by the headwaiter. Unfortunately, the extended poems are too few and far between, though Searles’ artwork (he died in 2011) saves the book’s bacon. (Poetry. 10-12)
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59020-808-3
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Duckworth/Overlook
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
A sampler worth sampling, despite pallid illustrations and a roster entirely made up of dead or veteran poets.
Kitted out—as usual for volumes in the Poetry for Young People series—with biographical headers and an outstanding introductory overview, the 33 short selections follow a generally chronological course. Atypically, the editors steer largely clear of explicit racial or religious themes in their selections. Phillis Wheatley’s pointed “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train,” and James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation” stand as exceptions. Along with contributions from James Baldwin and Richard Wright (both better known for their prose), notable additions to the standard African-American poetic canon include 19th-century writers George Moses Horton and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. More-recent meditations from Melvin Dixon (b. 1950) and Elizabeth Alexander (b. 1962) also help to freshen up the collection. Sadly, what vivacity these poems retain is sucked dry by Barbour’s monotonous successions of sad, big-eyed faces and drably colored collages. Well-intentioned, and at least as valuable for its editorial additions as its lyric contents. (index) (Poetry. 10-13)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4027-1689-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Sterling
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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