Woman Who Has Sprouted Wings: Poems by Contemporary Latin Americn Women Poets, and: Poesia feminista del mundo hispánico desde la edad media hasta la actualidad (review)

128 the minnesota review REVIEWS Woman Who Has Sprouted Wings: Poems by Contemporary Latin Americn Women Poets edited by Mary Crow. Trans. John Felstiner and Donald Walsh. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1984. 168 pp. $12.95 (paper). Poesia feminista del mundo hispánico desde Ia edad media hasta Ia actualidad edited by Angel Flores and Kate Flores. Mexico: siglo xxi, 1984. One of the anthologies of modern Latin American poetry published in 1984 and 1985, Jorge Rodríguez Padron's anthology of Spanish American poetry, includes a wide range of poems written between 1915 and 1980, but manages to omit women poets altogether. Another, Juan Gustavo Coba Borda's is more generous. It includes six women out of a total of seventy poets. These anthologies illustrate the fact that the literary institution in Latin America is still very largely a blood brotherhood in which women are regarded as intruders. In older histories of Latin American literature this marginalized status was stressed by including "literatura feminina" as an excrescence at the end of chapters, as if women did not fit into any recognizable chart of literary history or any innovatory dynamics. In 1985, poetry by women is still ghettoized, extraneous to the central avenues of literature. This marginalization is attacked in very different ways by two anthologies of women poets which were published in 1984: Poesíafeminista del mundo hispánico desde Ia edad media hasta la actualidad (Feminist Poetry of the Hispanic Worldfrom the Middle Ages to the Present), edited by Angel and Kate Flores; and Woman Who Has Sprouted Wings: Poems by Contemporary Latin American Women Poets, edited by Mary Crow. Angel and Kate Flores cover Hispanic poetry from the Middle Ages to a generation of women born in the 1940s and include poems ranging from anonymous orally-transmitted verse expressed from the point of view of a female "I," to the frankly polemic stance of some contemporary poets. Because the anthology concentrates on "feminist" poetry, the selection is weighted heavily in favor of poems that dwell on women's condition. But just as poems about men's condition—fear of impotence and going bald, hatred of marriage—only form a small part of men's poetic production, poems about women's condition do not necessarily present the main production of women writers. The merit of the Flores' anthology is that it includes many samples of lesser-known or unknown poets, as well as familiar poetry by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and Rosalia Castro. In contrast, Woman Who Has Sprouted Wings concentrates almost exclusively on a single generation of poets whose work is presented in the original Spanish and in translation. Almost all of the fourteen poets represented in the anthology were born in the 1930s and were therefore beginning to write in the 50s and 60s, that is, just before the new feminism reached Latin America. The exceptions are Rosario Castellanos, Claribel Alegría and Raquel Jodorowsky, all born in the twenties. What is striking about the poetry represented here is its all-pervasive though muted violence. With the exception of Claribel Alegría, whose poetry is the most overtly social in this collection, it is a violence directed against the self or displaced onto figures of the self such as the mother. The self-destruction so evident in Latin American narrative by women and in some theater (Griselda Gambarro) here takes the form ofa veritable reverse narcissism in which the writer can only create by destroying her own image. It is strikingly epitomized in the final lines of one of Cecilia Bustamante's poems: "From within, I kindle / the urge to cover up this scar / with the skin I tear from myself.'" Such attacks on the self demand poetic forms that are self-reflexive. Indeed, the poems rarely address a "you" except when the you is an alter ego. This, in itself, is surprising when one thinks of the vast number of poems written by men and addressed to women. It is as if in their rejection of a gendered subjectivity, these women can only construct the alter- reviews 129 native as an undefined often impersonal space. Rosario Castellanos speaks of "Grey...