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Directions To The Beach Of The Dead
Richard Blanco
Camino del Sol
University of Arizona Press
September 2005
On Sale: September 1, 2005
84 pages
ISBN: 0816524793
EAN: 9780816524792
Paperback
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Literature and Fiction | Fiction Poetry
In his second book of narrative, lyric poetry,
Richard Blanco explores the familiar, unsettling journey for
home and connections, those anxious musings about other
lives: “Should I live here? Could I live here?” Whether the exotic (“I’m struck with Maltese fever …I dream
of buying a little Maltese farm…) or merely different
(“Today, home is a cottage with morning in the yawn of an
open window…”), he examines the restlessness that threatens
from merely staying put, the fear of too many places and too
little time. The words are redolent with his Cuban heritage: Marina
making mole sauce; Tía Ida bitter over the revolution,
missing the sisters who fled to Miami; his father,
especially, “his hair once as black as the black of his
oxfords…” Yet this is a volume for all who have longed for
enveloping arms and words, and for that sanctuary called
home. “So much of my life spent like this-suspended, moving
toward unknown places and names or returning to those I
know, corresponding with the paradox of crossing, being
nowhere yet here.” Blanco embraces juxtaposition. There is the Cuban Blanco,
the American Richard, the engineer by day, the poet by
heart, the rhythms of Spanish, the percussion of English,
the first-world professional, the immigrant, the gay man,
the straight world. There is the ennui behind the question:
why cannot I not just live where I live? Too, there is the
precious, fleeting relief when he can write "…I am, for a
moment, not afraid of being no more than what I hear and
see, no more than this:..." It is what we all hope for, too.
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