Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Cuba (review)

metaphor, as in this description of olive picking: "My hand's small tongues grow blacker/in swallowing the dark fruit/dangling like gems of tar or/opulent mussels clustered/to some sea beast's restless/green and silvered mane." The result is a desire to crawl back through the poems and start to unpack them, even as the verbal energy thrusts us forward. These poems do not rely on form alone for their power. Spera, whose book was selected by Dave Smith as one of this year's winners of the National Poetry Series, has absorbed a wide range of influences. The first part of the book is rich with meditations on the natural world, such as "Tarantula," in which the poet invokes Frost while observing a group of boys tormenting a spider: "They are not humbled/by the flawless machinery of its form,/. . . still they fling their crooked stick/to the far weeds and crouch in silence as it/sidles back to the dark that gave it shape." Later Spera turns to the industrial world, with poems that recall, in both their single-stanza form and elegiac tone, the workingman laments of Philip Levine. Most surprising and effective, though, is the bravado Spera shows in the political poems that make up much of the book's final section. Spera finds a public voice in these poems that is reminiscent of Auden or, more recently, Robert Pinsky, without being merely imitative. He takes on subject matters as daunting as Bosnia and 9/11. Spera's formal skills help him modulate the emotional tenor of "In a Field Outside the Town," which dramatizes a man's survival of a mass murder. The poem constantly turns away from the horror to the pastoral imagery of a regenerative nature, until the dead merge with the landscape they'll become: "the bodies never found, bulldozed into clay" and later, "faces turned like gourds in the dark mire." The poem is powerfully restrained, as is "The Aerialist," which uses the narrative of Frenchman Philippe Petit stringing a wire between the towers of the World Trade Center and walking across to comment obliquely on the 9/11 tragedy. There's something about formal verse that tends to muffle personality , and too often when young poets turn to form it's an embrace of tradition over individual talent. Here, Spera lets himself be funny at times, sometimes crude, often violent. His verbal flourishes allow the poems to maintain a contemporary feel amidst conventional rhyme schemes. Spera's talent, luckily, is strong enough to endure the force of his influences. (SG) Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Cuba by Isadora Tattlin Algonquin, 2002, 308 pp., $24.95 Isadora Tattlin is the pseudonym of an American woman who traveled to Havana in the mid-1990s with her husband, a European businessman , and recorded the everyday struggles of living in Cuba. Her diaries , which span four years, chronicle the severe culture clash Tattlin experienced upon moving to that country from Europe with her two young children. While most of the names and identifying details of the people in the book have been changed or kept intentionally vague 186 · The Missouri Review to avoid political persecution, Tattlin successfully manages to convey the intimate texture of her life in Cuba, from her ongoing quest for basic foodstuffs in the markets (and black markets) of Havana to her encounters with the other expatriates and eccentrics who populate the odd social circle of foreign businesspeople in the tightly regulated country Though we get glimpses of Cuba's political and cultural history, the real story of this book is how one acquires the necessities of life there. Tattlin's prose comes most alive when recording the labyrinthine maneuverings it takes for anyone in Cuba to get anything , whether it be material goods, visas or medical attention. She demonstrates how finagling supplies and services has become an art form, to the point that her cook is an object of both Tattlin's veneration and suspicion for her skill in manipulating the black market. Tattlin begins the book with an inventory of the massive quantities of canned food, cleaning supplies and paper products that she ships to...