SPECIAL NOTE: Rhina’s new poetry collection, "Her Place in These Designs," is due for publication THIS MONTH, from Truman State University Press.
Intro:
Rhina Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic in 1932. She was seven years old when her father, fearing that his political protests against the Dominican dictator, Trujillo, were endangering his family, moved them to New York City in 1939.
Upon graduating from Hunter College with a degree in English Literature, Rhina married the sculptor and teacher, Alfred Moskowitz, and set out to teach high school English in the public schools of Queens. After their retirement from teaching, Rhina and Alfred moved to Newburyport, MA. They have three sons and three grandchildren.
For fourteen years Rhina coordinated the Newburyport Art Association's Annual Poetry Contest. She is a member of the Powow River Poets, which she co-founded. She has been instrumental in bringing about bilingual poetry readings in the North of Boston area, and bilingual activities shared by the high school students of Lawrence and Newburyport. She is a frequent reader and speaker in the Boston area, and conducts workshops at colleges and universities out of state as well. She was one of the eighty writers invited to participate in the National Book Festival sponsored jointly by the Library of Congress and the First Lady, and held in Washington DC on October 4, 2003.
Rhina has published ten collections, including: Lapsing to Grace (Bennett & Kitchel, 1992); Where Horizons Go (Truman State University Press, 1998), which won the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize; Rehearsing Absence (University of Evansville Press), which won the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; "Mundo y Palabra/The World and the Word" (Oyster River Press); The Shadow I Dress In (David Robert Books, 2004), winner of the 2003 Stanzas Prize; Playing at Stillness (Truman State University Press, 2005); a bilingual collection of poems and essays titled Agua de dos rios (Water from Two Rivers) (Editora Nacional, 2006), published under the auspices of the Dominican Republic’s Ministry of Culture (Editora Buho, Santo Domingo, 2006); and a bilingual collection of short stories titled El olor de la memoria/The Scent of Memory (CEDIBIL, Santo Domingo, 2007).
Her awards include the Sparrow Sonnet Prize; three yearly prizes from the Poetry Society of America; the Der-Hovanessian Translation Prize, the Barbara Bradley Award and the May Sarton Award from the New England Poetry Club; the Oberon Prize; the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award sponsored by The Formalist; the “Tree at My Window” Award from the Robert Frost Foundation (specifically for her Spanish translations of Robert Frost, and her English translations of Saint John of the Cross and the Dominican poet Cesar Sanchez Beras); the Dominican Republic's Salome Ureña de Henríquez Award for service to Dominican culture and education; a recognition award from the Dominican Studies Association and Division of Academic Affairs of Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College, and another from the Commissioner of Dominican Cultural Affairs in the United States; an award for services to Dominican letters, presented to her as one of the honorees at the Tenth International Book Fair held in Santo Domingo in 2007; a recognition as Distinguished Alumna from Hunter College, CUNY; and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Salem State College in 2008.
Like Tim Murphy, I, too, have had the unforgettable pleasure of Rhina’s Newburyport hospitality. I recounted the visit and discussed Rhina’s life and work in the article I wrote for Mezzo Cammin, Vol. 2, Issue 1, which may be viewed at:
www.mezzocammin.com/iambic.phpvol=2007&iss=1&cat=criticism&page=monsou r
Rhina has written some of my vary favorite sonnets. The first two I include here have, as their protagonista, the “mother’s mother,” who seems to be a Dominican incarnation of one of Frost’s New Englanders.
“FIND WORK”
I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—
Life’s little duties do—precisely
As the very least
Were infinite—to me—
Emily Dickinson, #443
My mother’s mother, widowed very young
of her first love, and of that love’s first fruit,
moved through her father’s farm, her country tongue
and country heart anaesthetized and mute
with labor. So her kind was taught to do—
“Find work,” she would reply to every grief—
and her one dictum, whether false or true,
tolled heavy with her passionate belief.
Widowed again, with children, in her prime,
she spoke so little it was hard to bear
so much composure, such a truce with time
spent in the lifelong practice of despair.
But I recall her floors, scrubbed white as bone,
Her dishes, and how painfully they shone.
BUTCHERING
My mother’s mother, toughened by the farm,
hardened by infants’ burials, used a knife
and swung an axe as if her woman’s arm
wielded a man’s hard will. Inured to life
and death alike, “What ails you now?” she’d say
ungently to the sick. She fed them too,
roughly but well, and took the blood away—
and washed the dead, if there was that to do.
She told us children how the cows could sense
when their own calves were marked for butchering,
and how they lowed, their wordless eloquence
impossible to still with anything—
sweet clover, or her unremitting care.
She told it simply, but she faltered there.
CONTINGENCIES
As if it mattered: still, you probe to trace
precisely when it was fate took and tossed
and overwhelmed you, find the very place
it was you stood on when you found—or lost—
the thing that mattered. When the envelope
slid through the slot, innocent as a stone;
what you were scrubbing when you wiped the soap
hastily on your apron, took the phone
and left the water running, out of breath
with interruptions, slow to grasp the news:
the baby’s birthweight, say, or time of death,
or diagnosis, casual as a fuse;
or in some public room, the stranger’s name
half-heard, and nothing afterward the same.
I love the little “shrug” at the end of this poem:
FOR EVAN, WHO SAYS I AM TOO TIDY
On grandson’s lips, “tidy” is pretty dire:
it smacks of age and tameness, of desire
banked by gray prudence, waiting for commands,
forced to endure the scrubbing of both hands.
But tidy sets the table, mends the toys,
lays out clean bedding and such minor joys
as underpin contentment and at least
nourish with daily bread, if not with feast.
Tidy’s been blamed for everything we suffer
from guilt to prisons. But free-wheeling’s rougher,
less wary not to fracture laws and bones,
much less adept with statutes than with stones.
True, tidy seldom goes where genius goes,
but then how many do? And heaven knows
there’s work for us who watch the time, the purse,
the washing of small hands. I’ve been called worse.
If Robert Burns had been a car mechanic and his mother, a poet:
RAT IN THE ENGINE
This is the story, as you tell it, flat,
in few words: he’d made a nest in some warm
nook of your engine, sensed you meant no harm,
and learned to watch you do the things you do
with wires; you liked his whiskers; then the fan
belt caught him, broke his neck, and that was that.
We trade more news, love’s noise, across the phone’s
thin, gritty bridge, and then the miles clang down
again between us. But I hear you still,
your voice warm in my ear that leaned to you
before you had a voice. Sifting the tones,
the words, I find you, son, a gentle man
wiser than books have made you, or the town
with its clipped hedges and its grid of streets.
In these hard times not every man one meets
mourns for his one involuntary kill,
or moves with care, like you, my grown-up child,
to share what room he has with something wild.
BIENVENIDA, RHINA! What makes women's poetry tick?