Directions to the Beach of the Dead (Camino del Sol) 1st Edition

Richard Blanco's Directions to the Beach of the Dead carries a moving recommendation on its cover from Sandra Cisneros, who writes of "feeling" that she "was trespassing on the intimate correspondence between a lover and a beloved." She also describes her desire "to be the receiver of such exquisite letters." Blanco's poetry inspires "intimate" and "personal" reactions. Students, who have studied his first book, City of a Hundred Fires (1997), speak to its "beauty" and "courage" and one student writes of a "personal engagement" with "people and places I've never met and never known." It is tempting then, as Sandra Cisneros does, to imagine ourselves "listening in" while Blanco engages his intimate other, but it is equally tempting to see ourselves as the receiver or even the sender of these letters. We find ourselves as active players within his poetry, imaginatively engaging the characters and places. In this sense then, Blanco's poetry is about engagement but also about absence; he creates a vulnerability in his writings within the strength and vitality of a language that is animate and alive. Blanco's work presents a curious paradox then: It possesses both a vulnerability and a strength, simultaneously open and exposed to emotional need and offering access to a force capable of coming to terms with such longing.

The volume's opening section offers glimpses into Blanco's travels in Rome, Venice, Barcelona, France, and Guatemala and Brazil. The collection's title poem instructs the reader on how to reach the "Beach of the Dead": "Go to Europe, go to Spain, in Barcelona, walk/under centuries hanging from the iron lamps" (ll 1-2). The poet then offers more personal suggestions for the journey: "Pull out your map, follow/the town's names lettered straight out to into the sea/ . . . you'll ask yourself: Should I live here? Could I live here? Don't answer" (ll. 20-21 & 27-28 [author's italics]). Arriving at the beach, the poet tells us to "take your sandals off, . . . take off your clothes,/lie between the sun and the earth, fall asleep" (ll. 44 & 46-47). The writer gives you his confidence, trusts you with the secret of how to arrive at the "Beach of the Dead." His trust gives us, his reader and companion, the confidence to cast aside our inhibitions, our guards against intimacy, and lie naked, as he has done, on the beach. The poem then is our journey through the underworld with Blanco, standing as a type of Dante's Virgil, guiding us through our realization of our vulnerability, our mortality, and our potential for re-animation in the minds of those travelers who come after us. The "iron lamps" that marked the initial stages of our journey can then stand as symbols both for "centuries" of longing and of light, of the imaginative illumination necessary to see ourselves as part of a long march of pilgrims to the "beach of the dead" and to its attendant realizations.

Blanco's poetic persona follows in a long line of travelers and allegorical journeys. Like the stories in ancient texts of the mysterious and mystical journeys of St Brendan or of Odysseus, Blanco's poet guide takes us from place to place, offering insights not only into the local geography but also making a connection between the landscape and the spiritual potential to which the landscape grants us access. In Central America, Blanco's poet finds himself, in "Winter of Volcanoes: Guatemala," "terrified" that he, might "let" himself "be seduced by the pure, living heart/of the raw earth" (25 & 26-27). In the moment of seduction there lies a tension between retaining an individual consciousness while, simultaneously, longing for total absorption within our fascinations, our seductions, our sensual pleasures. There lies, within the volcano and within the poet's temptation, a desire to become one with the forces of creation but also a desire for self-realization and self-consciousness; Blanco's poet-traveler "spelled out" his "name with/freshly minted stones" he "laid down to claim I was here" (ll.17-18 [author's italics]). The poet finds in the landscape the meeting place between mortality and immortality, an association that very place also carried for the writers of the ancient epic, the Papol Vuh.

The poet/traveler also explores landscapes specific to Blanco's past, using a film projector as a "a tiny, black time-machine" (l. 1) that "opens a hole in the living room wall like a portal/into lives I never knew, years I don't remember living" (ll. 3-4). In the recollections of various memories his family, Blanco, specifically recalls seeing his father, who "speaks into the camera,/but the film is silent, cloud shadows darken over /his dark lips, a voice I can't hear forever" (ll. 23-25). Blanco considers his father in other poems in the collection: In "What's Love Got to Do?" (a narrative prose poem) he waits for his father to "say something" that communicates deep meaning to his son, while sharing a drive to work with his father. His father tells his son stories of listening and dancing to Tina Turner's music when he was in Cuba. The poet recalls how his father "embarrassed" him "with his singing all summer, that summer before his throat smelled, before the weekly visits to Dr. Morad, before the Mitomycin and Hail Marys failed, before he'd never sing again. That summer when all I managed to ay was " Yeah, I love Tina too." Blanco recalls his father's inability to speak and, even before his father's cancer, of how they were unable to communicate through speech. There is an absence in these poems, an emptiness that the poet fills with longing and with love. His father anticipates their eventual contact in "Papa's Bridge," telling Blanco, from a bed in a hospital as his son "took his hand" (l. 33), that "You'll know how to build bridges like that someday" (l. 35 [author's italics]). Returning from memory into present recollection, Blanco crosses the bridge that was visible from his father's hospital bed, "spanning/the silent distance between us with the memory/ of a father and son holding hands, secretly in love" (ll. 36-38). Blanco's love communicates his longing for his father, recreates the love through imaginative recollection, recalls the pain of absence and the trauma of separation.

The cover of Blanco's Directions to the Beach of the Dead includes, in addition to Sandra Cisneros' remarks, an intriguing photo by Carlos Betancourt. A man lies face down on a beach, partially covered by sand. Markings and stones cover his naked torso (lines and characters in deep-blue-black, figures in bright red and pale-but-vibrant blue), suggesting a protective covering of spells and magic against naked exposure to the elements or even to a readers intrusive gaze. The figure in the photo though invites us in even as he shields himself from our encroachment. The man in the picture (Blanco himself is the model) is alive and strong but also vulnerable, like the poetry in the volume, offering self up for sacrifice but also for the potential of imaginative unity and transformation.

Bernard McKenna, PhD
Assoc. Prof of English,
University of Delaware
Newark, Delaware

These narrative poems are beautiful. The imagery that Richard Blanco creates with his words is captured emotion. I recommend this collection of poems and enjoy the journey the Richard Blanco takes his readers on.

Not my favorite work of his. He is an amazing poet, but I did not identify with these poems.

I first heard about Blanco when he read his inauguration poem on television. Initially I felt that it wasn't even poetry, but soon realized that whatever it was, it touched my heart. So I bought two of his books, and found that his work is just as direct and beautiful as when it is spoken. Blanco's stuff reaches to the core of my being.

He's a wonderful poet. What else can I say?

G
Ad to have this book offers.excellent, moving, insightful and poignant. Thanks for your talent and gifted writing blitzes. Best

Everything Richard writes makes me stop and think. Also brings back childhood memories that are different from his but so meaningful.

Buffalo NY has a literary community and has a series called Babel - Richard Blanco the author is the first speaker - his poetry is amazing and I am anxious to hear him on the 22nd