My brother – teeming with shadows – a hull of bones, lit by tooth and tusk, lifting his ark high in the air.Īnother stunning poem about her brother, Cranes, Mafiosos, and a Polaroid Camera, describes him ringing her in the small hours to ask how to fix his broken camera. With imaginative sleight of hand and perfect control, Diaz turns this extraordinary poem into an anguished stampede of biblical animals overwhelming her brother’s mind and, at one remove, her own. He has survived into this collection, too, variously and alarmingly reappearing with a knife, a gun and, most poignantly (It Was the Animals) a broken piece of picture frame – insisting it is an original piece of Noah’s ark. Her first collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec (winner of an American Book award), was about her addict brother. The familiar words seem gorgeously transgressive within their new context. If I Should Come Upon Your House Lonely in the West Texas Desert is a startling searchlight of a love poem that helps itself to a line from Goldilocks: “Each steaming bowl will be, Just Right”. She is fearless about naked (in every sense) truths and always surprising. There is a touch of Sharon Olds about the physical precision of Diaz’s poetry, its bravado and uplift. A lover’s hips are comically described as “the body’s Bible opened up to its Good News Gospel”. And there is no missing the potential for harm: “We touch our bodies like wounds.” Other poems are sexily devotional. Her image of “the cannon flash of your pale skin/settling in a silver lagoon of smoke at your breast” is more opening salvo than caress. Where others wage war, she wages love in poems of erotic confrontation in which there is more than a trace of forbidden fruit. In Postcolonial Love Poem, she uses the verb “wage”. Her take on sexual love is bold and complicated, balanced between surrender and resistance. Diaz explores possession, makes us think about what it means to be possessed by a country, a lover, a river.
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