Like a miniature autobiography in verse, Julia Alvarez's radiant 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.
In her afterword, Alvarez (The Cemetery of Untold Stories; Afterlife) calls the 26 poems "visitations from selves of the past and present." Her ability to inhabit earlier mindsets and re-create decades-old pivotal moments is astounding. In the Dominican Republic of the 1950s, she recalls, "despite the silencing and censorship of the Trujillo dictatorship, poetry flourished" in oral form. Indeed, the opening poem, "Recitation," commemorates the poet's debut performance "in a pink party dress with a flaring crinoline,/ waiting to entertain my mother's friends/ after their afternoon game of canasta." At that time, Alvarez notes in the afterword, 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. In "American Dreams," confectionery embodies the better future they sought: "all I knew/ was hunger, as I learned the names/ that promised sweeter dreams beyond/ these candied substitutes, Juicy Fruits,/ Life Savers, Bit O-Honey, Good & Plenty."
"First Marriage" presents loneliness, followed by a trip to a mental health clinic in the next poem. Even from afar, her three sisters bolster her--"There is power in groups of women"--and giving a talk at a retirement home unearths fond memories of her late mother. 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
Shelf Talker: Family memory and literary allusion infuse a tender collection about growing up under dictatorship, immigrating to the U.S., and life's stages and sorrows; here, poetry itself is a means of survival.