Lourdes Vázquez is a poet, essayist & fiction writer, a librarian by profession who is a leader in developing resources on Latin America from her post at Rutgers,  a Puerto-Rican American living in Brooklyn, a “Caribbean in exile” in her own words. Up to this point in time, she has been primarily a name that I’ve seen on lists – for example, one of the 91 poets scheduled to read at the St. Marks New Years Day Marathon this past January – but then Jerrold Shiroma thought to send me a copy of Park Slope, number 20 in his Duration Press chapbook series. It is flat out a terrific book.

 

Park Slope, readers away from the East Coast might not know, is the section of Brooklyn between Hart Crane’s favorite bridge & the Frederick Law Olmstead-Calvert Vaux-designed Prospect Park. Developed in the years after the Civil War but relatively isolated until the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, Park Slope’s economic & ethnic diversity are currently under considerable strain as it has become one of the trendiest addresses on the planet. The world of the Starbucks franchise is entirely absent from Vázquez’ view. While elements of the neighborhood – the Montauk Club, for example – enter into the text, the focus tends to be more close up. If this book were a cycle of photographs, we would see eyes, lips, elbows, hands, the corner of a chair, a windowsill.

 

The poems – it seems more of a series than a serial poem – are short & deceptively simple:

 

“Are we inside the fog or outside?” You asked.

“Inside,” I responded.

                          Like upside-down cats, we snuck away

              from the dew and the clouds.

 

              The lamp-post lit the few open bars and

               the anxiety in my face knowing that you were recovering.

 

It is the anomalies that drive this poem, the “upside-down cats” & the “anxiety” rather than relief at the idea of recovery. The whole question of being & knowledge is tucked into that figure of fog in the first line. This is a piece that, in both its density & sharpness, reminds me a little of the writing of Rae Armantrout – the highest praise imaginable.

 

Translated from the Spanish by the author & her daughter, Vanessa Acosta-Murray, the poems of Park Slope remind me also of another New York poet of long ago, Paul Blackburn. The conversational tone, use of observation, insertion of quotations & willingness to depart the left margin are all features of his poetry, although he would have been surprised at the feminist sensibility.*

 

At one level, Park Slope is a narrative project – there is a troubled relationship around which so many of these poems turn – yet not one articulated with beginning, middle & end. Rather, each poem seems an intervention, coming at the same set of questions from a wide range of different angles. Some of the most powerful are among the very shortest:

 

To close my eyes.

Let memory disappear

Let time cease and my sheets never remember.

 

One word on the translation – there is no facing Spanish, which is a shame, as these pieces in English demonstrate an excellent ear & I’m more than a little curious as to how they might sound in the original. They are in fact so well written I would not have guessed that they were translated if there were not a note to that effect on the acknowledgements page.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* One suspects that Blackburn, who died in 1971, would be surprised at any feminist sensibility. Given Blackburn’s own Spanish translations – his Poem of the Cid is the definitive version of that epic – it would be interesting to find out if Vázquez is familiar with his work.