A major new work from one of America's most acclaimed younger poets, Rafael Campo's Diva appears at the intersection of confession and confinement, hyperbole and humility. In his masterful third collection, Campo explores further the epic themes of his Cuban heritage and America's newness, his work as a doctor caring for AIDS patients and his identity as a gay man.
At once relishing and resisting the poetic traditions of formal English verse, Diva showcases Campo moving deftly between received forms and free verse. In each poem the sound of words is transformed into the highest of arts, the act of performance into the exercise of power, and the most profound abjection into the sweet promise of divinity. Culminating with his new and daring translations of Federico GarcÍa Lorca's sonetos-the great Spanish poet's most homoerotically explicit and formally accomplished poems-Campo's music instills in the reader an exalted understanding of beauty, suffering, and, ultimately, the human capacity for empathy. From reviews of Campo's previous poetry:
“Extraordinary meditations on illness and the healing power of words.”-Lambda Literary Foundation
“Read Campo to enter the bloodstream of a man who, with a haunting clarity of vision, shares his memories, his anguish, his healing love.”-Cortney Davis, Literature and Medicine
“Riveting, provocative, and refreshing-[this volume] is a gift to the clinician who is trying to re-invoke in his or her students the humility, compassion, and deep caring that brought us all into medicine in the first place.”-Dr. Sandra L. Bertman, Annals of Internal Medicine
“[Campo] listens to the sounds the body makes, but what he hears is poetry.”-ZoË Ingalls, Chronicle of Higher Education
“Powerful and accessible.”-Jonathan Jackson, Washington Blade
“Bemused, indelible, and heartbreaking.”-Marilyn Hacker, Out
“[Campo’s] private corral of disparate words twist, torque, collide with gorgeous creative imperative.”-Nomi Eve, Independent Weekly
About the Author :
Rafael Campo teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is the author of The Other Man Was Me, which won the 1993 National Poetry Series award; The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire, winner of a 1997 Lambda Literary Award for Memoir; and What the Body Told, published by Duke University Press and winner of a 1996 Lambda Literary Award for Poetry. Campo’s poetry, prose, and reviews have appeared in many major anthologies and periodicals.
Review :
"Rafael Campo's rhymes and iambs construct their music against the edgy, recognisable world his poems inhabit: the landscape of birth and of dying, sorrow and sex, shame and brave human persistence-first and last things, centre stage in these large-hearted, open, deeply felt poems." -Mark Doty, author of Sweet Machine "I know of no poet writing today with more courage and compassion than Rafael Campo. Like the practising physician that he is, Campo writes poems that heal artfully-or honestly face the impossibility of healing. Here we find sonnets for the damned, songs for the dying, the insistence on empathy for a prostitute with AIDS on a Boston street corner. There is the unforgiving squint of a mother rejecting her gay son. Yet there is a soaring lyricism in these poems, epiphany and redemption, a celebration of bloodstained, stubborn life as it bursts forth. The poems of Rafael Campo inspire that sharp breath of recognition. He has all my gratitude and admiration."-Martin Espada, author of Imagine the Angels of Bread [note: he gave us permission to edit, if this is too long]
