Susan de SolaFrozen Charlotte: Poems

Abstract

near-miracles, and ultimate tragedies that makes for an explosive and compelling read. The novel shifts in its second part, as Ybarra recounts her mother’s battle with colon cancer and her personal realizations regarding death and mortality. Each scene is reconstructed in striking detail, and Ybarra’s reflections combine the quotidian and the extraordinary in brief, elegant prose. She gives the same intimate narration, now quieter in tone, and her unabashed presentation advances the story and draws connections between violence and inevitability in her family. The Dinner Guest is an exercise in opposites. Where Ybarra’s grandfather’s kidnapping is sudden, violent, public, and discordant, her mother’s diagnosis and treatment are slow, private, and consistent with the status quo. Where her grandfather has priests who would divine his location, her mother has doctors who guarantee her recovery. And where Ybarra’s family grieves together for her grandfather, Ybarra’s siblings are spread out, and she must care for her mother on her own. It is this opposition from which Ybarra draws her own personal narrative and insights as she struggles to reconcile the distant and fragmented story of her grandfather with the immediate and all-too-coherent reality of her mother. English-language readers are also rewarded with this translation, as Natasha Wimmer skillfully captures Ybarra’s precise , compact prose. Wimmer stays true to the language of the book and conveys not only the words but the sensation of Ybarra’s straightforward sentences into English. As a result, readers can readily appreciate Ybarra ’s free recollections of loss and acceptance. It remains a moving narrative, with a balanced , serene perception of death and the lives that shape it. T. Patrick Ortez University of Oklahoma Susan de Sola Frozen Charlotte: Poems San Jose, California. Able Muse Press. 2019. 103 pages. IT WOULD BE easy—too easy—to steal from Richard Wilbur and say Susan de Sola’s poetry is “call[ed] to the things of this world.” Too easy because, as richly endowed with the world’s physical and visual bounty as de Sola’s poetry is, her debut collection, Frozen Charlotte, offers much more: a sense of history (especially as embodied in her eastern European Jewish forebears), of place (de Sola’s situation in Europe—she’s lived for many years in Amsterdam—is evidenced in the book’s cosmopolitan breadth of vision), penetrating portraits of people (and other forms of life), complexly loving evocations of her husband and children . . . all delivered with eloquence, musicality, a mastery of meter and rhyme (though free verse figures as well), and many touches of well-wielded humor. A number of de Sola’s strengths are especially evident in a blank-verse reminiscence of a not-quite-lover from her youth nicknamed Buddy. The poem’s eponymous subject, whom de Sola meets during summer stays at her grandmother’s beachside place, is a bit of a blue-collar misfit in de Sola’s “posher” world. After a dopefumed youth, he becomes a respectable fire department captain—only to die of an overdose of pills and alcohol in his late thirties. The poem ends with a moving valediction: “Chivalric Buddy, unafraid of fire, / yet quenched in liquor, his exit sudden , unplanned. / I recall his kindness, tilted nose, the mystery / that was his face (like many bearded men), / his soft blue eyes, the big and solid frame. / I wonder now, what was his name—his real name? / I wish that I had asked him. I would ask / him now: Buddy, tell me, what’s your name?” If I had to lodge a reservation about de Sola’s poetry, I’d say that it might be too rich with things, but that reservation may reflect nothing more than this reader’s difficulty in taking in such plenty (and/or this poet’s envy of de Sola’s ability to offer it). Better to say that de Sola’s is a “large” poetry in the best sense. It’s also distinctive . When you’re reading Frozen Charlotte , you’re spending time with a unique sensibility, both personal and poetic. Even WORLDLIT.ORG 103 as de Sola keeps faith with many aspects of poetry’s great tradition...