The Theater of Night, and: San Miguel de Allende, and: Bellini in Istanbul (review)

The Theater of Night, his latest book, is Alberto Ríos's moving, poignant tribute to his extended family and to his hometown of Nogales, Arizona. These powerful poems record from multiple perspectives the lives of two principal characters, Clemente and Ventura, whom we meet both as elderly Arizonans recollecting their lives and as they are subsequently recollected after their deaths by those whose own lives they influenced in a variety of ways. Like so much of Ríos's previous work, the poems in this new collection combine a musical, at times almost incantatory, handling of language and imagery with the narrative skill that is the hallmark of all his work, both in poetry and prose. Poem after poem is rich in the particularizing details that establish the emotional and cultural authenticity of the experiences recounted in them, while the volume as a collective whole amounts to much more than any simple record of two people. It is indeed a portrait of an extended community-a culture-that is almost mythic in character. The experiences of the two people ostensibly at the center of the poems are at once the stuff of life and larger than life. Take, for example, the opening of "The River Was Their Honeymoon," which unfolds into the whole world:

Small and slight, quiet and under-stars as it seemed,A whisper to anyone else, a nothing, a task, a place for ghosts,

The river was everything for the two of them,Their honeymoon every time, every new time

The way the water in the river was new every time.Their river started at this small creek

But the closer they walked toward it the more it seemed to change-It was a mighty river, then, a great wave

And ripple, and ripple again, that ran through Paris, and Madrid,London and Africa and to the south, a river with many names,

Many disguises, many passports and languages, the Seine,The Nile, the Thames, the Volga, the Amazon . . .

("The River Was Their Honeymoon")

The cataloguing of names and repetition of key words and phrases is "spellbinding" in the fullest sense of the word, casting the poet's spell over the experiences he describes here and throughout the collection, raising, ennobling, memorializing Clemente and Ventura, and with them the people-the culture-for whom they stand.

At the same time, and despite the expansive scope of time and place the collection involves, many of the poems are immediately and intensely personal, as when Ríos recounts the meeting of two old men:

Mr. Clemente Ríos and Mr. Lamberto Díaz in a combined musicRaised to as loud as they could make their voices beAnnounced to the worldTheir love for each other.Then after hugging they kissed each other on the cheekAnd meant it. There was no mistakeThough it was neither scandalous nor revelatory.

    . . .For Mr. Ríos and Mr. Díaz it was an uncommon day,And they never spoke of it again.But for an afternoon and an evening,They were in each other's companyAnd in love with the world.

("Chance Meeting of Two Men")

Probably it is Mr. Díaz, then, who, in the following poem, recalls Ventura, who has died:

She's gone, Clemente, I know. But I see herIn your eyes, I see what you're looking atWhen you look away.Where your eyes used to beI see her.

    . . .It was as if she were cut out from the worldAnyway, something saved off the page.It's something you told me and that I've remembered, Exactly as you said it.Wherever she is When you look at her, Clemente,I see her too.

("The Conversation of Old Husbands")

The collection's title poem, which is at once hypnotic and troubling, universal and entirely personal, testifies to the mysteries...