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Reviewed by:
  • Letters to Borges by Stephen Kuusisto
  • Andrea Scarpino (bio)
Stephen Kuusisto. Letters to Borges. Copper Canyon Press.

Stephen Kuusisto begins his second poetry collection, Letters to Borges, with an epigraph from Yehuda Amichai: “And soon, in the coming nights, / we will appear, like wandering actors, / each in the other’s dream / and in the dreams of strangers whom we didn’t know together.” Although fewer than half of the poems in the collection address Jorge Luis Borges, Kuusisto develops what feels like a true correspondence with the dead writer with whom he shares at least one important attribute: blindness. Written from places as diverse as Syracuse, Los Angeles, London, Buenos Aires, Helsinki, and Madrid, Kuusisto’s letters sometimes describe the city from which he writes, continue a conversation seemingly begun off the page, or invoke Borges’s own imagery or writing. Even though we read only Kuusisto’s half of the correspondence, we do indeed begin to understand the two men as “wandering actors, / each in the other’s dream,” each a dedicated friend, supporter, and colleague of the other.

The poem “Letter to Borges in His Parlor,” for example, invites the reader to imagine Kuusisto and Borges deep in philosophical conversation, with Kuusisto asking, “What is there to love anymore, my friend?” and “It is good, Borges, to have a mission, don’t you agree?” In “Letter to Borges from North Carolina,” Kuusisto describes explaining that he is blind to a policeman who accuses him of jaywalking. Toward the end of the poem, he writes, “How do you tell strangers / That people may live / Who cannot see?” The reader is never given Borges’s responses to these questions, but in a book that demonstrates death doesn’t prevent continued conversation, we can imagine Borges’s return letters arriving with the next postal delivery.

Although blindness is a recurring theme throughout the collection, as is disability more generally, Kuusisto is careful never to allow blindness to become a commentary on character or a metaphor for inability or lack. In “At the Winter Solstice, Iowa City,” for example, Kuusisto writes, “Borges, if only they’d given you a dog / You’d have known // Blindness stands for nothing.” Blindness is just one fact of these poems, and while it is a deeply important and framing fact, it is given no more or less importance than the fact of the night sky or of mortality.

At the same time, however, blindness is also shown to be its own complicated [End Page 162] and textured way of knowing the world—a knowing that sometimes allows realistic representation, and sometimes relies heavily on lyrical interpretation. In “Letter to Borges from Estonia,” Kuusisto writes, “Where I go is of considerable doubt. / Winter, Tallinn, I climb aboard the wrong trolley. / Always a singular beam of light leads me astray.” In his juxtaposition of straightforward language and rich lyricism, Kuusisto thus writes with as much attention to what can be seen with the eyes as what can only be imagined. In “Letter to Borges from Tampere, Finland,” he writes,

And my ruined eyes took the roses and broken shardsOf twilight and built another village—a countervillageWhere the houses stood like wineglass stems.You could see through everything—Even the walls of the church—A fact that didn’t bother anyone,As men and women made of lightAre necessarily long-lived and unconcernedAbout the hour.

Here, “my ruined eyes” allow the reader entry into a world in which twilight looks like “roses and broken shards,” a village is made from “wineglass stems” and people are “made of light.” Blindness is thus a conduit for lyrical leaps in thought and image that allow the reader a new perspective, an altered perception, a new attention to light and darkness, image and beauty. The closing of “Letter to Borges from Dublin” reads, “This light proclaims there is justice, / And I can still make it out with these ruined eyes.” Here, again, blindness frames perception without limiting it in any way. Indeed, these “ruined eyes” allow the speaker to see justice in moonlight.

As in Kuusisto’s earlier poetry and creative nonfiction, the poems in Letters to...

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