Rehearsing Absence
by Rhina Espaillat
The University of Evansville Press
I-mdash;-mdash;54-1

fter reading this collection of poems, poets everywhere may well envy those who live in Rhina Espaillat's home town in Massachusetts, because that is where she helps to direct the monthly workshops of The Powow River Poets.

Espaillat's poems have a way of speaking directly to each person listening: a rare gift. But she has many gifts: wit; ready intimacy; a natural understanding of the strange, the erratic, and the commonplace; the ability to translate those for others; keen vision into things, people, processes and events; a broad intellectual background upon which palimpsest her poems take form,;and the kindness to share all these with others.

Since the penultimate on that list brings up the subject of the visual arts, it's tempting to think of her husband's sculpture as a complement to her formalist poems, which have a three-dimensionality about them. On the other hand, Espaillat's poems comprise more than three dimensions; sometimes they are five-dimensional.

In "Negations," for example, she hits upon eternity and its simultaneous nonexistence:

"as if your days were plates of summer fruit 
that you may wash and quarter, core and pare 
for guests, until you notice they've gone mute, 
gone home for good, if they were ever there."

The final line is both ironic and blissful, a combination that comes as naturally to Espaillat as rhyme and elegance.

"On Being Accused of Optimism after Predicting Good Weather" is especially musical, and delights with lines like

"how calibrations country people learn 
to make, measure the thinning of the air"

and " overcast/ with unspent weather" dovetails perfectly with the final line, "forgetting what I meant, or meant to say."

"Practice" honors the divine gift of making all children one's own, as well as the gift for storytelling.

The sly ironies of "Enjoy Your Meal!" (an "insincere" message from her microwave) stand in jovial counterpoint to the blunt truths there.

"Minefields" is a powerhouse. It can bring tears; perhaps the themes of deep friendship, the road, children and war are the mélange that does it. Incredibly, this poet can juxtapose a tragic youthful death with children banging on lids; but the din is part of the WWII remembrance, as well. She writes, "We always make it. Having come this far / we count on destinations."

There is an echo of Samuel Beckett in "Four O'Clock": one line there may hold the whole "the landscape only seems to stay"). This, again, speaks of the meaningfulness of ephemera. It opens:

"The eye, uncertain, almost sees 
a luminescence through bare trees 
rotating by minute degrees,"

and ends:

"that time is an imperfect sum. 
Nothing to do but let it come, 
whatever light, wherever from."

This is Rhina Espaillat's fourth collection of poems. The second, Where Horizons Go, won the TS Eliot Prize in 1998; this book, Rehearsing Absence, won the Richard Wilbur Prize for 2001. John Frederick Nims awarded her the Nemerov Prize for one of her sonnets, and neo-formalist poetry has grown much the richer for her high craftsmanship, inspiring instructional beacon, and lyrical gifts.

© Terese Coe