Author: Milena Gomez Alvarez

ISBN:  074141404X

Genre: poetry

This review was contributed by: John Walsh & CLICK TO VIEW John Walsh's Reviews 

Love, of course, is a many-splendoured thing and an entirely suitable

thing for poets to use as their subject matter – but is it enough to

sustain a collection of poetry – even a collection as slender as this

new book by Cuban author Milena Gomez Alvarez?

In 64 pages, Alvarez provides a variety of poems dealing with love –

albeit love under the guise of different emotions. She has a

consistent voice and style, which tends towards the lyrical, although

her poems generally exhibit neither rhyme nor scansion. This is a

problem for a young author, whose ear cannot yet identify the halts in

rhythm that occasionally creep in and who would benefit from greater

discipline at this stage in her career. An example of this from the

poem “You Make Me Happy:”

“Now to the world I want to scream

How blissful and secure, you made me be.”

Why ‘to the world’ instead of the natural and greatly superior ‘Now I

wan to scream to (or preferably ‘at’) the world? This unnatural and

arrhythmic interpolation spoils the flow and has no benefit at all.

Further, without the discipline of scansion, there is absolutely no

reason for this.

The opening stanza of “Two Different Worlds” has the same problems:

“A bond of two humans

In contrast with each other, will it last?

Oil and vinegar they might compare to

Yet in love two become one.”

This reads like poor English – compare what to what? Who are the

‘they’? Why are ‘they’ relevant here? The conceit itself is trivial

and the simplicity of the style seems to infect the meaning – the best

poets can use simplicity to illuminate the dark complexities of the

world, not to reduce those complexities to superficiality. 

One final example will suffice. This s from “Another Year Ending”:

“Another year ending!

Yet memories, in history won’t be

Bad or good, better or worse,

To forget them impossible seems.”

Are you sure? Memories won’t be bad? That impossible seems.

John Walsh, Shinawatra International University, January 2005