Matria
Alexandra Lytton Regalado
Black Lawrence Press, 2017
Alexandra Lytton Regalado’s debut poetry collection, Matria, examines the prodigies constellated between motherhood and motherland, between English and Spanish, between the United States and El Salvador, between the self and a selfless apprehension of suffering in the world. Regalado’s finely-wrought poems roar in a language haunted equally by “la Carabela de Colon,” “piramide of moreno kewpies / y los hijos de Hernán,” and the cul-de-sacs of the American suburbs where a family becomes “a hallway / of closed doors.” Matria ranges across geographic, cultural, and temporal borders, offering a complicated vision of North and Central American life at the end of one century and at the beginning of another. Like the Lotería cantor’s riddle in “Salvadoran Road Bingo,” Regalado’s words remind us: “Day after day, our fingers in the wounds—here it is, touch it, there is the proof—surviving is what we do best.” Matria, however, is about much more than survival; it is fundamentally a book about how “the body elaborates its ministry” and how ordinary cells might become a vessel of grace, “rooted in / the things unknown but longed for still.”
“La Mesa,” perhaps Matria’s central poem, writes through Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel,” broadening the scope of the original poem to explore the class and power dynamics of Salvadoran life in the post-civil war era. Regalado’s poem begins by addressing and echoing Forché: “Yes, what you’ve written is true.” The poem then pans out, past the sack of severed ears, past the death squads of the 1980s, past the stories of the ex-guerilla leader turned president, through sandbagged streets where divisions are as transparent and unbreakable as the bulletproof glass of an SUV. The bleak reportorial heft of Forché’s poem, strikingly counterbalanced by the lyricism of its prose, is replaced by a simple urgency at the heart of “La Mesa”: a mother trying to explain her homeland, her life, to her son. This relationship between mother and son provides the subject matter for one of the most moving poems in Matria, “The T'ai Chi of Putting a Sleeping Child to Bed,” which reads:
In the lull of evening, your son nested in your arms
becomes heavier and with a sigh his body
sloughs off its weight like an anchor into deep sleep,
until his small breath is the only thing that exists.
And as you move the slow dance through the dim hall
to his bedroom and bow down to deliver his sleeping form,
arms parting, each muscle defining its arc and release—
you remember the feeling of childhood,
traveling beneath a full moon,
your mother's unmistakable laugh, a field of wild grass,
windows open and the night rushing in
as headlights trace wands of light across your face—
there was a narrative you were braiding,
meanings you wanted to pluck from the air,
but the touch of a hand eased it from your brow
and with each stroke you waded further
into the certainty of knowing your sleeping form
would be ushered by good and true arms
into the calm ocean that is your bed.
Ultimately, Alexandra Lytton Regalado’s Matria transcends the narratives it braids together and the meanings it plucks from the air; like all good poetry it does more than say and mean. It cups your face and runs its hand across your brow. It touches. It gently directs your gaze. It allows you this ocean, this dreaming.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.
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