The Visits and Other Poems/Las visitas y otros poemas by Mirta Yáñez (review)

Mirta Yáñez was born in Cuba in 1947, and she writes poems about how she first discovered Old Havana on a visit with her schoolmates. Yáñez's volume also represents her attempt to identify her unique persona within Cuba's literary heritage. Her effort reminds the academic reader of T. S. Eliot's essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," which teaches that the poet cannot articulate her own voice until she first renders homage to her poetic ancestry.

This volume includes a prologue by José Antonio Portuondo, who recalls the poet's excursion to Old Havana with her fellow students in her art history class. Portuondo describes Yáñez's fascination with the various styles of architecture in the old Spanish colonial part of town, much of it dilapidated. Yáñez writes of the nostalgia evoked by the stained-glass windows, iron gratings, and art nouveau fixtures. For the contemporary American reader, Cuba is synonymous with nostalgia. Yáñez discovered the anachronistic charms of Cuba before the Revolution, so her poetry adds a valuable perspective. She adds depth to her reflections by evoking the specter of Rimbaud on her stroll through Old Havana. She also summons the voice of Bola de Nieve, a famous Cuban singer she recalls from her youth.

Other poems in this collection remind the reader that Mirta Yáñez earned a doctoral degree and taught literature at the University of Havana. In fact, she writes with a sense of duty to preserve poetic tradition and to convey it to the next generation. The poem entitled "Quehacer generacional/A Generational Duty" is a virtual anthem to all professors of literature who have tried to persuade their students of the efficacy of poetry. The poem is a professor's impassioned plea to her students to embrace their poetic heritage. The very next poem in the volume, "Periodización/Periodicity," traces all the ages of poetry from Pre-Columbian, to the Conquest, to Neo-Classicism, Romanticism, and Modernism. This deliberate progression through the sequence of literary movements likewise recalls the poet's academic background.

Mirta Yáñez is obsessed with acknowledging her debt to literary tradition, and she dedicates a poem to Christopher Columbus entitled "Primera crónica/First News Report." The poem never mentions the name of Columbus, who is identified as "El Almirante/The Admiral." In the poem, Yáñez imagines Columbus writing his first report of Cuba on a parchment. As he concludes his chronicle with a period, he stores the parchment unceremoniously next to a bead necklace that will be traded with the indigenous people of the island. The poem's ironic conclusion suggests that Cuba's first literary artifact also represents the origin of capitalism and commerce in Cuba, as well as the extinction of indigenous customs.

In another poem, "Conferencia/A Lecture," the professor tries to explain the passions that inspired the ancient poets. As she lectures on the yellowed pages of the bygone poets, her mind wanders, and she speculates on her students' desires and on her own emotions, which are not the subject of her lecture, but which are foretold by the ancients. Other poems pay homage to Latin American writers who have inspired Yáñez, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Rubén Darío, Horacio Quiroga, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In "Rubén," the professor introduces her students to a bust of the Nicaraguan poet and tries to make them understand the poet's struggle without referring to his poetry, but merely by contemplating the bust. The poem entitled "Contextos de Sor Juana Inés/The Contextual Contours of Sor Juana Inés" acknowledges the boldness of the early feminist poet.

"Objetos/Objects" is a warning against the excessive nostalgia that inspires yet paralyzes poets. As the poem begins, the poet finds a small stone in a drawer and knows that she placed it there...