From Publishers Weekly
Parents and kids, pride and political fear, abuse and recovery from abuse make recurrent themes for Silex's fluent and punctuationless free verse, a style halfway between Lucille Clifton (one of Silex's mentors) and W.S. Merwin. Religious language flows freely here—"everyone seeks/ what is sacred," he writes, "to be rid/ of the evil born in us." Openhearted in the presence of children but enraged at the injustice of adults, Silex's speaker seems to have survived particular evils; several poems mention self-destructive impulses (self cutting, the suicide of a friend) and pay tribute to the grandparents who raised him. Other works examine large-scale sufferings, from the Rwandan genocide to the travails of migrant laborers. Born in El Paso, now teaching at St. Mary's College of Maryland, Silex shows particular attraction to the resilient folkways of Native Americans, though Latino, Palestinian and African-American subjects get a look-in as well. Adapting Western forms to global concerns ("Aubade," "Ode with a Lament") Silex (
Through All the Displacements) can succumb to cliché ("the only choice/ children have is to make laughter and play") or to left-wing platitude ("forty thousand children die/ each day because of words/ like free markets democracy"). Silex's sophomore volume nevertheless ably fuses personal testimony with multicultural history, asking "how many contradictions it takes/ to bring one human into being."
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About the Author
Edgar Silex comments that he "writes poetry because he believes that a state of grace is our ultimate human condition, forgiveness is our highest form of love, awe is our only muse, suffering is our path to salvation, beauty is our only reward, displacement is our human inheritance, passion is our only freedom, restraint is our act of kindness, solitude is our wisest friend, simplicity is our most complex desire, reverence is our highest achievement, and poetry is our most constant state." Mr. Silex has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Maryland State Council for the Arts. He is the author of Through All the Displacements. He lives in Laurel, Maryland and teaches at St. Mary's College of Maryland.
