Higginson Reviews

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Reviewed by William J. Higginson

Those who know Bobby and Lee Byrd’s Cinco Puntos Press know that their books often dance atop the twitchy wall between art and politics, and usually bring light to both sides. Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s Elegies in Blue contains, as its subtitle says, “Poems”—and a good deal more. The titles of the book’s four sections give a foretaste: “Learning To Do Philosophy”, “Now, No One Knows Why You Fought”, “Elegies in Blue”, and “Notes from the City in Which I Live: Poetry and the Political Imagination”. The last section is an essay, and an important part of the book, which I’ll take up below. The three sections of poems well illustrate the variety of modes and moods their titles suggest.

The opening poem, “Oración: A Man at Prayer”, is addressed to “amor”, love, and quickly moves to a richly human understanding:

Amor, I am no longer a child. I have learned how
To speak in the hard language of the world—I want
My words soft as a new and tender leaf. I want to say
This: love makes nothing easy.

Perhaps my favorite poem in the first section is “The Rags of Time on Río Vista Farm”, opening with a series of brief reflections on the past inhabitants of a piece of drought-stricken land and its rotting buildings: orphans, Japanese internees, braceros. From these musings the poet turns to clothes, first in general, then in a man’s closet, and finally to a pile of cast-off clothes in the corner of a room where people once lived. One of the high points of the piece is the catalogue Sáenz builds from the labels of the shirts in that closet, notes on the globalization of the garment industry:

                    . . . made in
Tunisia 100% cotton care on reverse 100% rayon
hand wash cold made in U.S.A.

The poems of the next two sections, “Now, No One Knows Why You Fought” and “Elegies in Blue”, take the theme of loss and death—or death and loss—further. Sáenz’s critique of our society becomes a critique of human weakness, not of the giants who fight and die, but of those of us left wondering what it was all about. “What Was It All For, Anyway, César, César Chávez”ends:

I have a picture
Of you. The man who took it, more famous than you.
You don’t look like a saint or a prophet. You
Look like an ordinary mestizo who is fashionably
Unfashionable. A star, César. Now, no one
knows why you fought.

I loved [my husband’s]
hand upon my back. The roughness made me tremble.
Forty years that man could make me tremble. He’s buried next to me. In death I swear he snores.

In the end, I am the luckiest of men: I have fallen in love with my struggle to wed my politics to my art and to remind myself that neither my politics nor my art can be separated from the community to which I am bound. There is yet another irony in my life: I started my journey toward becoming a poet with the idea of the beautiful. I understand, now, what the beautiful is. The beautiful is to be engaged in a struggle that matters. The beautiful is to be grateful for the ground that was given me.