Customer Reviews

Where Horizons Go: Poems

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I've taught Rhina's work for the last two years at a small northeastern college, and the students respond to her as to no one else. They understand her work and love it, and when they're not sure, she intrigues them mightily. You cannot go wrong with "Where Horizons Go."˙

I've been reading Rhina Espaillat's work for a decade. She enjoys the restriction of formal verse: sonnets, villanelles, and sestinas, for example. On the page, her work looks formal. In the ear, it sounds conversational. It's a difficult and precise balance, and when it works, the effect is magic. She's been making it work for nearly fifty years.

The poet was born in the Dominican Republic. English, her second language, is a subject she taught for many years. She revels in the glories of it, all the beauties of poetic device. She brings to her work the wisdom of an immigrant, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a teacher, and a shrewd observer of the poignant details of nothing more than the color brown, and nothing less than her own parent's Alzheimer's Disease.

These poems will raise the hair on the back of your arm.

Rhina P. Espaillat's "Where Horizons Go" is for readers who look for poetry to curl up with on a rainy day with a pot of tea. Espaillat's exquisitely crafted, polished formal verse never raises its voice, but speaks in the quiet, conversational tone of a wise but self-deprecating best friend. "Sixty-Five" demonstrates her rueful humor: "My body hates me. And it's mutual, too./ We never speak these days except to fight./ There's less and less I like it still can do./ My bladder yells at me; my clothes are tight." Every poem in the collection is a gentle gem, the work of a poet who has experienced much, but has never wavered in her bedrock belief in order, reason, and civilization. When her grandson Evan accuses her of being "too tidy," she replies, "True, tidy seldom goes where genius goes,/But then how many do?" She delights in the work of artists who illuminate everyday life, like Vermeer, "whose people, drenched in light, like honey, wear/the blessing of the hive." To read "Where Horizons Go" is to enter into a world where the everyday is infused with quiet magic; to reread it is like meeting a beloved old friend on the street. At the end of "Rachmaninoff on the Mass Pike," Espaillat says, "All the heart wants is to be called again." Her poetry calls to readers' hearts, with modest but masterful authority.

Sonnets, villanelles, formal poetry of all types are found in Ehina Espaillat's first collection. Her poems aren't constricted or artificial, but come out with an elegance not often seen in poets today. Every poem in this collection is evidence that she loves language, poetry, and the challenge that comes in writing in rhyme and meter. The subjects of her poems range widely, though there does seem to be a high ratio of poems about poetry. There is also an interesting essay at the end of the collection that discusses growing up bilingual (Espaillat is from the Dominican Republic, and Spanish is her native tongue), which leads into a discussion of the beauty of language. Both the poems and the essay make this a book to treasure.

Anyone who has ever gone to a grandmother or a beloved aunt for comfort or advice will recognize this still, small voice that speaks with such authority and grace.

"Where Horizons Go" is a must-have for any serious contemporary poetry collection. The anatomically and politically correct "Bra" alone is worth the price of the book:

If only the heart could be worn like the breast, divided,
nosing in two directions for news of the wide world,
sniffing here and there for justice, for mercy.

You won't regret this purchase.