[In the following review, Roses offers qualified praise for Another America.]

This is the first volume of poetry for Barbara Kingsolver, whose previous books include The Bean Trees (1988), Animal Dreams (1990) and the short-story collection Homeland and Other Stories (1989). The first thing one notices about this collection is that each poem comes with a Spanish translation by the Chilean writer Rebeca Cartes. There's no preface to tell us how the bilingual arrangement came about or for which audience it was designed, but it's clear from the outset that Kingsolver feels a deep connection to the Spanish-speaking lands that begin before the Rio Grande and stretch all the way to the windswept limits of Tierra del Fuego.

Kingsolver knows that a political gulf much wider than the river separates North from South. Often there is no welcome for those who flee northward, seeking sanctuary. Ironically, the regimes that force them into exile enjoy aid from the US. Over the last century our policymakers have seldom understood populist or revolutionary leaders, but have chosen to support the authoritarian “stability” of military regimes and their protection against “subversion.” This disquieting knowledge gives rise to many of the poems of Another America/Otra America.

These are, for the most part, highly political poems by a committed human rights activist who seeks to stir our consciences and enlist us in the cause of social justice and pacifism. Taking the high moral ground, she draws inspiration from two Latin American beacons: José Martí, the Cuban patriot-poet, and Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan poet-priest and Minister of Culture. A particular closeness binds Kingsolver, born in rural Kentucky, to Father Cardenal, who as a novice in 1957 entered the Trappist monastery at Gethsemane, Kentucky. In “The Monster's Belly” Kingsolver wishes she could have shared the comfort of knowing Cardenal and his nurturing God:

Now, Father Ernesto, I find you were there all along
with the monks at Gethsemane, Kentucky.
I could have walked there
in my blunt shoes, could have visited you
and your laughing Lord who made the best rain fall
on beans and rice.

Though aspiring to Cardenal's quiet joy and theology of love and liberation, she feels caught “in the belly of the monster,” a phrase coined by Martí at the turn of the century to describe the United States (“Conozco al monstruo / He vivido en sus entraflas: I know the monster. I have lived in its belly.”) Kingsolver contrasts Cardenal's “laughing Lord” with the forbidding, apocalyptic one of her own religious training:

… What a difference
to have known this Lord,
or at least to know
he shared the same small sky with mine, who promised only
that the horned and headed monster
would come out of the sea
for the purpose of ending the world.

Leaping from a spirituality that she envies to Cardenal's unsympathetic view of America, Kingsolver arrives at a picture of herself, too, as a victim of her country's aggression:

You and I were no closer than the living and the dead
who share a cemetery on a Sunday afternoon.
Father Ernesto, you were a citizen of the domain
of your profound desire to kill the monster,
and I was already in its belly.

How does she construct this image of a poetic self devoured by her own country? Her experiences are surely not commensurate with those of Martí, who witnessed US annexationist fever, nor of Cardenal, whose country was invaded and occupied by the US. For Kingsolver the issue is a psychological one. Born in 1955, she recalls a childhood when mock air-raids and civil defense drills instilled fear of the supposed Soviet peril, implanting an enduring xenophobia that she detects everywhere, especially in the anti-Communist rhetoric still alive in the 1980s:

The television says McAllen, Texas
is closer to Managua than to Washington, D.C.
and housewives in McAllen check their own
possibly Bolshevik eyes in the mirror
and lock the windows.

(“Justicia”)

Fear of “the other” is what Kingsolver seeks to denounce. The allusion to intimidated Texas housewives (from whom the poet distances herself as much as she can) also furnishes us with a key to Kingsolver's perspective on Latin American victimization as paralleling that of women. Time and again she imagines the female body as a house invaded, robbed and sullied, a magnet for violence. In “Refuge,” dedicated “to Juana, raped by immigration officers and deported,” the Latin American female is a metaphor for double oppression. The poem's narrator speaks to a woman wetback just as she arrives at the border:

Give me your hand,
he will tell you. Reach
across seasons of barbed wire
and desert. Use the last
of your hunger
to reach me. I will
take your hand.
Take it.
First he will spread it
fingers from palm
to look inside
see it offers nothing.
Then
with a sharp blade
sever it.
The rest he throws back
to the sea of your
blood brothers.
But he will keep your hand,
clean, preserved in a glass case
under lights:
Proof
he will say
of the great
desirability
of my country.

That amputated hand, the officer's trophy becomes a searing and memorable emblem of cruelty, a symbol intended to arouse our indignation at official callousness. It also signifies suffering, sacrifice, the desperate bravery of a woman rejected at the threshold of redemption.

But can lyrical poetry bear the weight of politics? Can the leap from spiritual identification to militancy bridge the gap between the Latin American experience and our own? Not, I think, when the poet demonizes US history. My sense, reading these poems, is that Kingsolver believes that if the US didn't conjure up enemies there would be none. Perhaps it is an illusion that a progressive, pacifist American can join ranks with militant Martí and priest Ernesto Cardenal, two Latin American male patriarchs dedicated to their countries' sovereignty and self determination who have given little thought to machismo, sexual oppressions and gender in equalities. Mixing poetry and politics is a volatile business, and given the demonological assumptions that run through these poems, I suspect they will appeal primarily to those who seek to commemorate and mark political occasions.

The last two sections of Another America/Otra America transcend both hemispheric differences and programmatic politics. Here, Kingsolver's tone becomes celebratory, as she wrests serenity from personal and collective suffering, and embraces trust as an acceptable substitute after love has failed. In haunting and telling natural images, she memorializes people she has known (“Poem for a Dead Neighbor,” “Your Mother's Eyes”), moments of grace (“Bridges”) and witness to survival (“Remember the Moon Survives”). She excels particularly in poems about the female condition and our spiritual connection to animal life, either wild or free. “Apotheosis,” for example, is on the order of a Pablo Neruda ode, but, unlike Neruda's, hers is female-centered, affirming daily life, creativity and personal autonomy:

There are days when I am envious of my hens:
when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure.
as a single daily egg.
If I could only stand in the sun,
scratch the gravel and blink and wait
for the elements within me to assemble,
asking only grain I would
surrender myself to the miracle
of everyday incarnation: a day of my soul
captured in yolk and shell …
. …
And yet I am never seduced,
for I have seen what a hen knows of omnipotence:
nothing of the miracles in twelves,
only of the hand that feeds
and,
daily, robs the nest.

(“Apotheosis”)

The North-South gap—political, economic, and cultural—is as unbridgeable as ever, but in these poems Kingsolver creates room for coexistence through her bilingual format and fruitful collaboration with a Latin American woman. Cartes' graceful translations often enhance the originals. This arrangement encourages Anglos to cross over and discover the pleasures of the Spanish text; Latin American readers, regularly ignored by mainstream publishers, are addressed at the same time. If Spanish and English can be made to coexist on the facing pages of an open book, Kingsolver seems to say, then a cultural dialogue between North and South can be brought into being as well. That is something to look forward to, even if only in the sanctuaried space of more literary texts like this one.