Borders: (New Poets of America)

"The poetry of Mary Crow is as we would expect of an artist deeply troubled by her experiences. The writing is taut, lean with the struggle to persevere and become its own true cause; and by the grace and the power of her art, the poems in Borders are kept from vanishing into the pain itself, thereby making a voice and presence for herself that is the fulfillment of her search for self. In short, she is the quintessential artist who is made whole by the very processes of art. Let us welcome Mary Crow to the company of poets."-- David Ignatow

Review :
Crow, an American poet and translator of contemporary Latin American women poets, here presents a book of colorful poems set mostly in South America, an exotic landscape with the underlying sadness of poverty: "daily, baskets of eggs beside the dusty hovel,/ daily, gray green water to drink,/ daily, bruised pears in the garden." But ultimately these poems rely too heavily on description. Often Crow suggests a theme without really developing it, and in a poem about a father's torture seems not even to believe in the power of words: "It is not happening to you, to me./ The fact is this father is only a father/ in a poem, a construct of sound." Crow is at her best in "Going Home," transcending her own pain and "driving thru loneliness to the other side," but in general these poems lack the depth, passion, and revelation of the human capacity for evil displayed in Carolyn Forche's The Country Between Us (LJ 3/1/82). -Bettina Drew, City Coll., CUNY Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. In her first collection, Crow (translator of Woman Who Has Sprouted Wings: Poems by Contemporary Latin American Women Poets ) proves herself poetically accomplished and politically committed. The "borders" of the title furnish an apt metaphor: more than boundaries between countries crossed as the narrator journeys through Latin America, they also become barriers separating her from a lover and then a coupled "us" from a "them." Crow's "they" signifies political prisoners and people imprisoned by their beliefs: the crippled parishioners who toil to the tops of mountains to kiss the Christ who will "save" them; the men and women who seclude themselves on islands; even those who, like the narrator, attempt to forget themselves and their woes through travel. Such borders bless Crow with a necessary distance, allowing her the luxury of an observer's role along with the right to express outrage, as seen in her poem "The Real Thing." There she comments on a man tortured by the police because his son is a "subversive": "This is only one incident among many, / only one incident in another country. / It is not happening to you, to me." Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.