Poet's Choice

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, April 15, 2007

An epic, in Ezra Pound's memorable definition is "a poem containing history." But lyric poetry also contains history, on a domestic scale. Rafael Campo's new book, The Enemy, along with poems responding to the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq, contains "A Simple Cuban Meal," about the way a family dinner includes people who are no longer present in body:

We gather at the table, even those

who left us long ago. We eat roast pork,

black beans and rice, and tell the story of

the avocado tree that had to be

cut down, that took so many years to bear --

but once it did, how generous it was!

I see Abuela halving one, sharp knife

through soft green flesh; she'd gather them beneath

a shade so dense I thought it permanent.

A freak windstorm felled it. It listed like

a sinking ship a week or two before

the man came with his chainsaw. "Memories,"

she'd shrug, when I spoke wistfully of it.

She never seemed to miss that tree, although

it was a few more years after she died

before we'd have an avocado in

a salad. Tasting it, I understand

how little pleasure teaches us in life.

Much more honorable is sacrifice.

Campo often writes in rhyme. Here, his fluent unrhymed pentameters, with their plainspoken quality, recall the same measure in Robert Frost's great blank verse poems "The Death of the Hired Man" and "Home Burial." The presence of "even those/ who left us long ago," recalls another predecessor, Thomas Hardy, and another poem of family history, "The Self-Unseeing":

Here is the ancient floor,

Footworn and hollow and thin,

Here was the former door

Where the dead feet walked in.

She sat here in her chair,

Smiling into the fire;

He who played stood there,

Bowing it higher and higher.

Childlike, I danced in a dream;

Blessings emblazoned that day;

Everything glowed with a gleam;

Yet we were looking away!

Campo's poem emphasizes the complex remembered past that underlies the Cuban family gathering; Hardy's concentrates on the long-ago moment, its absence of self-consciousness. Both poems recognize the vivid, intimate presence of the past.

(Rafael Campo's poem "A Simple Cuban Meal" is from his book "The Enemy." Duke Univ. Copyright 2007 by Rafael Campo. Thomas Hardy's poem "The Self-Unseeing" can be found in "The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy," edited by James Gibson. Macmillan.

Copyright 1976 by Macmillan London Ltd.)

Robert Pinsky's most recent book is "The Life of David."