Gloria Vando - Spring 2008 Feature

THE CORTLAND REVIEW

GLORIA VANDO - POETRY - SPRING 2008 FEATURE

FEATURE
	Debra Allbery
		"The Third Image": Constellations of Correspondence in Emily Dickinson, Joseph Cornell, and Charles Simic, an essay on ekphrastic poetry and the notion of poetry and painting as "the sister arts."

	Debra Allbery
		Three ekphrastic poems: "Courbet," "No Tutor but the North," and "How to Explain a Dead Hare."
	POETRY
		Betty Adcock Charles Coté Martyn Crucefix Burt Kimmelman Eric Pankey Michael Salcman Nicholas Samaras Jim Tilley Gloria Vando Eleanor Wilner
	Interview
		A Note on Fictional Truth, a Conversation with Ed Pavlić, by Andrew John McFadyen-Ketchum.
	Book Review
		"A Change of Maps" by Carolyne Wright—Book Review, by David Rigsbee.

Gloria Vando

			Gloria Vando's most recent book of poems, Shadows and Supposes (Arte Publico Press, 2002), won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award and was named the Best Poetry Book of 2003 by the Latino Hall of Fame. Also from Arte Publico Press, her first book, Promesas: Geography of the Impossible (1993), a personal encounter with the history of colonialism and her family roots in Puerto Rico, was a Walt Whitman finalist and won the 1994 Thorpe Menn Book Award. She is a contributing editor of The North American Review. A Puerto Rican born in New York City, she writes in Spanish and English.

Guernica

—for Michael Montel, October, 1973

Could he have imagined
when he wept on canvas
showing the open wounds
of his native soil and flesh
that someday someone
in a country out of range
would transcribe his horror
into stitchery? Yet there it is,

highlighted in the window
of this fancy East Side store:
a massacre in miniature,
stencilled for dowagers
to stitch in shades of gray
while viewing newer wars
in living color.

Further down Fifth Avenue
Father Berrigan and a few
of his disciples bear witness
on the steps of St. Pat's Cathedral,
leaning wearily across
dead centuries as they
spread the blood-stained word
thou shalt not kill
in (this time) Cambodia.

Uptown, in the barrio,
a rat-gnawed baby screams.

And somewhere in between
as though to round off
this American joke
a tacit people, unseeing, unseen,
transform Guernica
into needlepoint.