Like a miniature autobiography in verse, Julia Alvarez's radiant poetry collection Visitations offers snapshots from her life: a childhood in the Dominican Republic, immigration to 1960s New York City, the vicissitudes of adulthood, and the bittersweetness of later-life love.
Alvarez's ability to inhabit earlier mindsets and re-create decades-old pivotal moments is astounding. In her afterword, Alvarez (The Cemetery of Untold Stories) recalls, "despite the silencing and censorship of the Trujillo dictatorship, poetry flourished" in oral form in 1950s Dominican Republic. Poetry "was political by its very existence," and she imagines that the poet's role then, as now, is to lighten the evening--and perhaps the burden of repression: "I am to make the difference, turn the tide/ on the darkness massing round as the night drops down."
After the family's move to the U.S. in 1960, her world expanded as her father's shrank--brilliantly captured using the metaphors of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which she reads in "Waiting for My Father to Pick Me Up at the Library." "I'd already gone through that door/ and couldn't go back" versus the "This was the trade-off for coming to America:/ you became as small as the country you came from" that she addresses to her late father, who struggled to learn English. Aging and troubling world events threaten her sangfroid, but unexpected romance ("this spring-surprise/ of love in our autumn years") and the comforts of home ("I Go Through the House, Turning Off Lights") keep her steady.
With its vivid scenes and alliterative phrasing, this gorgeous collection presents food and family, memory and companionship, as talismans to hold against the darkness. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck