Elegies in Blue: A Book of Poems [Paperback]

Benjamin Alire Sáenz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2002

Benjamin Saenz writes, "In the desert, we live in a desert of translation." That is exactly what he sets out to do, in this, his third book of poems—translate experience into words. He writes of history and learning and death. He writes of loss and knowledge and the difficulties of coming to terms with the harsh and untamable landscape of the border. Ultimately, his elegies are "stones that praise the lives" of those who have given him words.

In the tradition of Latin American literature, Saenz believes that poetry should be part of the public discourse and not shunted aside as irrelevant to our country's larger issues. Here he maps out personal, political and spiritual histories. He speaks about political and literary heroes, anti-heroes and everyday people, and he remembers his growing up Chicano in the Catholic world of the U.S./Mexico Border. From these elements, he creates a philosophy of speaking publicly as poet.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

To date, S enz (English, Univ. of Texas, El Paso; Dark and Perfect Angels) has split his literary career almost in half between prose and poetry. The latest addition to his corpus melds the two genres into two dozen poems largely composed in prose. Liberally expanding the application of the term elegy, S enz casts a tone of lament, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, over most of the subject matter childhood, innocence, family, life, death. This mood culminates in the ubi sunt ("where are") motif in the poem "At the Grave of the Twentieth Century," which pays homage at the graves of the likes of Karl Marx, JFK, the poet's father-in-law, and his grandfather. Thematically perpetuating his preoccupation with politics and ardently defending the Mexican American border community of which he is an integral part, these poems are drenched in much firmer reality and overlaid with more indignation than his recent novel Carry Me Like Water. Recommended especially for public libraries serving Mexican American populations, who will relate to the themes of restlessness and alienation. Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

To write well about your life, you need to have a life worth writing about. On that score, Saenz, a son of the Rio Grande border, hits pay dirt. At that border, poverty meets wealth more starkly than anywhere else except, perhaps, at Israel's fences between Jews and Palestinians. When a writer there speaks of himself, he can speak of his people and how the border defines them. That Saenz does in verse and prose poems distinguished by simple mellifluousness, clear imagery, and effortless balancing of the oracular and the personal voices. He writes of a boy asking important questions, loving the names in books, and figuring out why his father quit drinking (for love, though "love makes nothing easy"), and that boy is more imaginably him than the first-person speaker in other poems, an "I" that includes every border native who knows why the subjects of the book's many elegies--figures ranging from Denise Levertov to Cesar Chavez to Maria de Guadalupe Cenizeros, "citizen of Smeltertown"--are important to their identity. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press; 1 edition (February 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0938317644
• ISBN-13: 978-0938317647
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #239,520 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Benjamin Alire Sáenz was born in 1954 in his grandmother's house in Old Picacho, a small farming village in the outskirts of Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1954. He was the fourth of seven children and was raised on a small farm near Mesilla Park. Later, when the family lost the farm, his father went back to his former occupation--being a cement finisher. His mother worked as a cleaning woman and a factory worker. During his youth, he worked at various jobs--painting apartments, roofing houses, picking onions, and working for a janitorial service. He graduated from high school in 1972, and went on to college and became something of a world traveler. He studied philosophy and theology in Europe for four years and spent a summer in Tanzania. He eventually became a writer and professor and moved back to the border--the only place where he feels he truly belongs. He is an associate professor in the MFA creative writing program at the University of Texas at El Paso, the only bilingual creative writing program in the country. Ben Saenz considers himself a fronterizo, a person of the border. He is also a visual artist and has been involved as a political and cultural activist throughout his life. Benjamin Sáenz­ is a novelist, poet, essayist and writer of children's books. His young adult novel Sammy & Juliana in Hollywood was selected as one of the Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults in 2005, and his prize-winning bilingual picture books for children--A Gift from Papá Diego and Grandma Fina and Her Wonderful Umbrellas--have been best-selling titles. A Perfect Season for Dreaming is Ben's newest bilingual children's book which has received two starred reviews, one from Publishers Weekly and one from Kirkus Reviews. He has received the Wallace Stegner Fellowship, the Lannan Fellowship and an American Book Award. His first book of poems, Calendar of Dust, won an American Book Award in 1992. That same year, he published his first collection of short stories, Flowers for the Broken. In 1995, he published his first novel, Carry Me Like Water (Hyperion), and that same year, he published his second book of poems, Dark and Perfect Angels. Both books were awarded a Southwest Book Award by the Border Area Librarians Association. In 1997, HarperCollins published his second novel, The House of Forgetting. Ben is a prolific writer whose more recent titles include In Perfect Light (Rayo/Harper Collins), Names on a Map (Rayo/Harper Collins), He Forgot to Say Goodbye (Simon and Schuster), and two books of poetry Elegies in Blue (Cinco Puntos Press), and Dreaming the End of War (Copper Canyon Press).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A remarkable selection of free-verse poetry, May 16, 2002

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Elegies in Blue: A Book of Poems (Paperback)

Elegies In Blue is a remarkable selection of free-verse poetry by Benjamin Alire Saenz that transcribes the author's life experience of learning, absorbing history, growing, experiencing joy, and suffering terrible loss. Creating poetry akin to elegies in that it praises the lives of those who helped the author find the right words, Elegies In Blue is a book of memorable, dynamic verse. "You're an icon, now,/Sabes? And nobody gives one damned minimum-wage/Dollar that you broke your fasts by going/To communion at your local Catholic Church./The Body of Christ did not save your causes."

5.0 out of 5 stars A miracle in free-verse, October 1, 2007

By 

Mr. Silence (The Bowery) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Elegies in Blue: A Book of Poems (Paperback)

Without a doubt, Benjamin Saenz is the leader in Chicano literature today. He is gifted with a talent for a writer's eye. He blends the "big ideas" of political ideology and the struggle for identity with the "small ideas" of intricate detail well. This is a fantastic collection of poetry that appeals to the sides of our personalities that ache for rebirth and reconciliation. This is a must have.

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Pedestrian, at best., January 25, 2005

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Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Elegies in Blue: A Book of Poems (Paperback)

Benjamin Alire Saenz, Elegies in Blue (Cinco Puntos Press, 2002)

I don't want to simply call Benjamin Alire Saenz' Elegies in Blue a bad book and leave it at that. Thankfully, Saenz himself provides me all the ammunition I need to back the claim up in the last piece in this book, an article he wrote a few years back called "Notes from the City in Which I Live: Poetry and the Political Imagination." In it, Saenz spends a good deal of its twenty pages putting politics and poetry at opposites, offering up an apologia for why he writes political poetry. The end result boils down to "if Harold Bloom thinks it's bad, all the more reason for me to do it." Which is all well and good, if it's done well. There are a handful of poets who work in the political arena whose work is consistently good (Carolyn Forche is the first who comes to mind). Benjamin Saenz is not one of them.

Ironically, the best poem in this book, though its epigraph is something of an absurdity, does lead one to think that perhaps Saenz did take this verbatim from someone else; "Maria de Guadalupe Cenizeros, citizen of Smeltertown, sings a lullaby explaining the color of the headstone on her grave." Saenz' voice here, be it fictional or no, grasps everything necessary to write a good poem, and does so. With the exception of the refrain of "I loved" at the beginning of each sentence, the poem stays completely rooted in the image, without delving too far into the metaphors Saenz seems to so roundly despise from the text of "Notes from the City in Which I Live." This poem (which is entitled, I should mention, "The Blue I Loved") is a prime example of how to write poetry with a message and make it stick. Unfortunately, it seems as if Saenz didn't grasp that, and much of the rest of the work here founders in the vagueness and judgment-words that should be excised from the vocabularies of any poet, professional or inspired amateur, by the time he first publishes:

...And anyway, who taught you how to spell
The word injustice? People hate it when you use
A word like that. Such a big word, Cesar.
Too big for you...." ("What Was It All For, Anyway, Cesar, Cesar Chavez?")

Saenz begins the closing of "Notes form the City in Which I Live" with the sentences "I am a writer. Somehow, by some great miracle, I have become a possessor of the word." What we can gather Saenz does not understand is that anyone can be a writer. What not everyone can do is write well. Such is the case here. **