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Poetry Collections
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Crucifixion
in the Plaza de Armas
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Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas
is a collection of Martín Espada's Puerto Rico poems. Espada means
'sword' in Spanish, and the poet contemplates the meanings of his
name for conquerors and rebels over the centuries. He writes of
colonialism and the movement for independence, from the Ponce
Massacre to the epic life of Clemente Soto Vélez, a poet imprisoned
for 'seditious conspiracy'. Espada also creates a narrative of
family, searching the mountains for the grave of his
great-grandfather, or bearing witness to the struggles of his
cousins to survive.
These poems insist on the details that give history a human face and
resistance a human voice, finding transcendence in the music of
African slaves, in the caves where spirits dwell, even in the
miraculous mop of a janitor.
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"The best new poet I've read for years."
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---Adrian Mitchell
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February, 2008
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Smokestack Books
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In his eighth collection of poems,
Martín Espada celebrates the power of poetry itself. The Republic
of Poetry is a place of odes and elegies, collective memory and
hidden history, miraculous happenings and redemptive justice.
Called by Sandra Cisneros “the Pablo
Neruda of North American authors,” Espada traveled to Chile in July
2004 to take part in the commemoration of the Neruda centenary. The
heart of the new collection is a cycle of Chile poems. This is a
narrative of creation, destruction and redemption: Neruda’s house in
Santiago, wrecked by the military during the coup and rehabilitated
in a democratic Chile; Joan Jara walking through the stadium where
her husband Víctor was executed after singing for his fellow
prisoners; the young poets who rent a helicopter and “bomb” the
national palace with poetry on bookmarks; the disgraced ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet, jeered leaving a used bookstore.
The Republic of Poetry
is a land where poets return from the dead. Robert Creeley shares a
cigarette with Henry David Thoreau; Clemente Soto Vélez visits in a
dream and urges a pilgrimage to the caves of Puerto Rico; Julia de
Burgos speaks to a man in jail, who paints her face on an envelope.
This is a land of miracles, where the God of the Weather-Beaten Face
frees Carlos Mejía—an
Iraq war veteran turned conscientious objector—from incarceration,
and Captain Ahab himself leads a rather demanding poetry workshop in
Provincetown.
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- October, 2006
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- W.W.
Norton
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“Martín Espada
is a poet of annunciation and denunciation, a bridge between Whitman
and Neruda, a conscientious objector in the war of silence.”
- —Ilan
Stavans
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“Martín Espada’s big-hearted poems
reconfirm a “Republic of Poetry” that is truly pan-American, drawing
on its many traditions and daring to insist upon its dreams of
justice and mercy even during the age of perpetual war. His poetry
is earned and his gift is generous.”
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—Sam Hamill
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- “Espada means
‘sword’ in Spanish, and in these new poems Martín Espada wields the
sword of his poetry like a veritable Zorro. The ghost of Allende
rises, the ‘disappeared’ reappear, and the legacies of Neruda and
Creeley say why they are not dead. Espada unites in these poems the
fierce allegiances of Latin American poetry to freedom and glory
with the democratic tradition of Whitman, and the result is a poetry
of fire and passionate intelligence.”
- —Samuel Hazo
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“What a tender, marvelous
collection. First, that broken, glorious journey into the redemptive
heart of my Chile, and then, as if that had not been enough, the
many gates of epiphanies and sorrows being opened again and again,
over and over.”
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—Ariel Dorfman
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“The Republic of Poetry is a
dreamland, a utopia, a paradise of the imagination, where the local
food is salutation and valediction, where the bloodstained plazas
speak history, and where the law of the land is empathy. Martín
Espada, like his spiritual forebear Pablo Neruda, names us all, in
his every hard-fought line, to our citizenship in this nation of the
great, indelibly American word.”
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—Rafael Campo
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Alabanza:
New and Selected Poems,
1982-2002
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Martín
Espada is the Pablo Neruda of North American
authors. If it was up to me, I'd select him as the
Poet Laureate of the United States.
—Sandra Cisneros
With these new and
selected poems, you can grasp how powerful a poet
Martín Espada is: his range, his compassion, his
astonishing images,
his sense of history, his knowledge of the lives
on the underbelly of cities, his bright anger, his
tenderness, his humor. He commands all the levels
of language from the colloquial to the high
prophetic tone. He is a master of his craft and he
has a great deal to say to us. Here is a major
poet whose due is long overdue.
—Marge
Piercy
Martin Espada
wields his poetry like a flint, striking sparks,
cutting to the bone. To read this work is to be
struck breathless, and surely, to come away
changed.
—Barbara
Kingsolver
A sword (Espada)
going in, deeply inside.
—Eduardo Galeano
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- April, 2003
W.W. Norton
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A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen
(2000)
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- W.W. Norton
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Imagine the Angels of Bread
(1996)
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- W.W. Norton
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City of Coughing and Dead Radiators: Poems (1993)
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- W.W. Norton
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Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover's Hands (1990)
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- Curbstone Press
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Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction (1987)
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- Bilingual Press
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Essays
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Zapata's Disciple
(1998)
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- South End Press
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CDs
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Now The Dead Will
Dance the Mambo (2004)
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- Leap Frog Press
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Anthologies
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Poetry Like Bread
(2000)
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- Curbstone Press
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El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poets (1997)
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- University of Massachusetts Press
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