Songs of Gratitude and Fields of Wonder: A Review of Maía’s Portraits

In Maía’s Portraits, the world is profoundly alive, each breeze, blade of grass, and stone, not in a general sense, as an attitude or concept, but as a partner in an ever flowing and unfolding dialogue. This is a world lit with—not by—the sun of early childhood, before circumstances forced Adam and Eve to first notice they were naked, as recalled by a visionary all too aware of the world’s corruption. It is a world whose vulnerable beauty breaks the heart, yet no impending threat has caused the poet to despair, to cease to explore, to ever pause in her asking of questions and her expectation of a response. In “Mockingbird Night,” for example, Maía writes,

Silence, the simplest prayer, falls at dusk 

when blue dark comes fast, and we sing what we hear, 
you and I, our last late repertoire— 

and for a time, all is concord. 

Silence, something passively heard by the poet, or almost heard, in a foreign language, is something not quite there; yet it is, at the same time, a “prayer,” an action. This not so simple prayer then “falls” at dusk, taking the poet (and the reader) with it. We are swept along, consumed by the “blue dark [coming] fast,” before being called to “sing,” to give form to the mystery we hear, both separately and together, the intimate other and the unknown I, “and for a time, all is concord.” 

In the ten poems devoted to Maía’s literary and artistic models—there are poems focused on other species as well—even the dead come to life, or rather, they are still alive, with each tone of voice, small gesture, bodily posture, and flicker of expression embodied in such a way that the reader is fully there, watching and listening, eyes wide and ears attuned, even as they wander with the author through the rooms and corridors and mists and landscapes of her memory to determine what these moments mean. 

In “Finished, Baby,” a poem about author and activist James Baldwin, Maía writes,

First heard your voice shimmer round the radio 
cracking words like justice between your teeth, I could nearly 
feel those enormous bruised eyes of yours 
from magazine portraits, eyes that’ve seen, you said, 
too many men die

In a sequence of synesthetic elisions, Baldwin’s voice “shimmers,” becoming visible “round the radio,” i.e., at a distance, and Maía “feels” his “enormous bruised eyes” in her heart, as if she were tracing those bruised half-circles with her fingers. Baldwin’s voice “cracks” words like “justice” between his teeth. The poet evokes the several decades of Baldwin’s involvement in the quest for social justice—as well as his sense of alienation and his war with personal demons—by describing the way the word emerges from his mouth. 

As much as the author’s style is immediately recognizable, there is nothing formulaic about these poems, nor are any two figures presented the same way. Each scene and psyche is explored with the freshness of the Zen “beginner’s mind.” 

Why do we say that a garden
   must be larger than a single leaf?

Maía writes in a poem about Soviet dissident poet Irina Ratushinskaya. She then continues,

Women of the Small Zone keep a secret garden— 
   carrot chive turnip seeds smuggled in the seams
   of shirts, hems of jackets—
   shapely grains, precise botanic alphabet
   passed between prisoners—code 
   intelligible to fingertips

In Maía’s poems, there are worlds inside of worlds, the metaphysical hidden in the physical, the mythic hidden in the mundane, the political hidden in the personal.

Irina is the one who writes, bending 
   over her forbidden poem, microscopic script, 
   minute verses inscribed on strips of paper, 
   four centimeters wide rolled tight… 
   smaller than the little finger 
   small enough to smuggle— 
   seeds in poems out

If our world is, in fact, despite its fallenness, still a garden, the greatest wealth is perhaps to be found by looking down, by magnifying what at first might seem the less significant, as though one were to suddenly plunge into the space inside an atom, only to find that this space yawned open on the stars. We might be tempted to think that the most valuable of elements, the greatest works of human art, are to be found beyond the heavens, in the Gnostic pleuroma, in the sky beyond the sky. Why, then, is Pluto said to guard such stores of wealth in the caverns beneath the earth? In Maía’s poems, we are prompted to find out. 

If down turns into up, just as east turns into west, any map we draw will depend on our shifting frames of vision. Here: wind howls through an empty factory. There: buds open on a branch. There may be patterns, yes, yet no two moments are alike. As the author visits with her creative models—as much beloveds as models, and even when her model happens to be some species other than human—she takes the visit as an opportunity to reimagine her language, to play, to express her gratitude, to analyze and transmute the gifts she once received. 

In “Echo,” a poem about author and environmental activist Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring was perhaps 50 years before its time and to whose warnings we have not yet really listened, Maía writes,

In the sea, nothing lives to itself 

The great body of mother-ocean 
circulates hormonal instructions altering the fate 
of beings who haven’t arrived yet, lives touching lives 
distant in time 

spruce groves and kelp, comb jellies, grey gulls, 
anemones, green crabs, whelks and periwinkles, 
flowering dunes, laughing women… 

In the beginning… was the plankton

In this poem, we are with Maía as she walks with Rachel on the beach, both out of time and in the urgency of time, as well as with our mother, the ocean, as she breathes, and with the hundreds and thousands and millions of tiny creatures that may well soon meet their ends. 

If each poem devoted to a beloved model tells us something about the author’s use of language, about twists and turns of her creative history, this is not to say that the book does not exist as a unified whole. It is as though the author were leafing through an album of family photos—some recent, some of distant relatives not seen since early childhood, and some of long since departed ancestors—all the while amazed to see flashes of her own features in their faces. Such echoes and refractions are not explored to serve the author’s image, let alone her “brand”; no, quite the opposite. They serve to tell us that the poet is a meeting place—perhaps the site of a lost garden, perhaps the eye of a gathering storm—and that, when all is said and done, no caution will protect us, no effort will serve to guard the expectations of the ego. 

There is a gentle, elegiac sadness in many of these poems, as if the author were first recovering then leaving pieces of herself behind, as she probes into the light, as she gives herself to an ever-widening web of interconnection. Is “sadness” really the word I’m looking for, though? The space into which the book calls me is an autumnal one, a space of hard-won clarity, of gratitude tested by the surety of loss, of fulfillment, both creative and spiritual, a space of valedictory joy.

About Maía: I was born in Southern California in the outskirts of LA, grew up in a small, Spanish-speaking neighborhood. I still live in SC, closer to the Pacific coast now where the sea is often breathing in my ear. I am motivated by intense love for the Earth, all its creatures and elements, not only humans. Collaboration with other writers and artists nurtures me, while pursuing typical publishing industry goals does not. Over my lifetime, being a writer has become a more or less continual spiritual/intellectual/sensual practice, when I am making sentences and when I am silent—a way of discerning connections, of coming to know and being known.

Portraits is available for purchase or by donation (pay what you can) through Untimely Books.