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"Luis Pales Matos, a white man who began the poesia negra movement in Latin America in 1925, is the subject of The Numinous Site, Julio Marzan's latest book. Unlike its English-language counterpart, poesia negra refers to its subject and not the poet's race, so white poets are credited with writing poesia negra." "Pales's poesia afroantillana popularized the "dark" forces (African roots and unprestigious language) that were the white society's antimatter, an antipoetic consciousness that, complemented and refined by other poesia negra, opened the Latin American poem." "Perhaps influenced by Heidegger, throughout his work Pales reiterated his obsession with the frontier where the mundane touches the spiritual or metaphysical. His poems take the reader on a passage to an encounter with the imagistic representation of that force informing the soul of the individual, the collectivity, and the physical world. All his poems take us on that passage, including his socially conscious Afro-Antillean poems, because they originate from Pales's sense that language, including "Boricua," is synonymous with time and our sense of being. For Luis Pales Matos, poesia was an altar, and style a liturgy that, whether performed in drumbeats or words, invoked the poetic essence that he called the "numen.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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CHOICE Review

Marz'an brings to light new interpretations of Pal'es Matos's poetic works in this thorough analysis of his poems. After reviewing Pal'e's poetry and the criticism of his works, Marz'an asserts that Pal'es has not received the recognition his poetry merits because the majority of Pal'es's critics misread and belittled the popular images in his Afro-Antillean poetry. Critics like Margot Arce, for example, have equated the presence of the negro in Pal'es's poetry with the grotesque and crude lowlife of Puerto Rico. Furthermore, Marz'an suggests readers should grasp Pal'es's conscious desire to separate the non-Western culture from the Western culture imposed on his people. He sees Pal'es's works as the product of intentional "sophisticated instruments of thought as well as artifacts of beauty" and as a way into the path of the numinous site in his poetry. In chapters 5 and 7, the author analyzes the poetry, pointing out images of the numen and examples that illustrate the numinous site, particularly in the "Fili-Mel'e" cycle. For those who know Pal'es's works as a representation of the jitanj'afora, this book will open new horizons. Graduate students; researchers. T. Rozo-Moorhouse; California State University, Fullerton

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Julio Marzan, distinguished Visiting Professor of Languages and Cultures at William Paterson University, is the author of The Numinous Site: The Poetry of Luis Pales Matos and The Spanish-American Roots of William Carlos Williams, among other works. He also edited Inventing a Word: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Puerto Rican Poetry and was chief consultant for the National Public Radio series Faces, Mirrors, Masks: Twentieth-Century Latin American Fiction.

(Bowker Author Biography)