Description:
Rafael Campo seems to have recognized early on that, like William Carlos Williams, his work as a physician gives him entry into what Williams called "the secret gardens of the self." No wonder Campo's best poetry has always drawn on his knowledge of the human body and his informed compassion for the sick. But if the ghost of Williams hovers over the pages of Diva, so does that of Walt Whitman, with his life-affirming philosophy of connection and brotherhood, and his joyous acceptance of the flesh. Campo's third collection is arranged in five sections, the first drawing an imaginative map of Cuba and the poet's conflicted feelings toward his paternal homeland. In "The Dream of Loving Cuba," he writes: It's half-erect
beneath America on all my maps--
just look at how it wants me, shamelessly,
a geographic urge that can't be helped,
a crime of nature, both a heretic and ever faithful to its needs.
Indeed, Campo is often strongest when describing experiences beyond his own, whether the subject is pre-revolutionary Cuba, motherhood, or slow death from AIDS. His is the voice from the bedside, the voice of the interested onlooker. This capability serves him well in "Baby Pictures," a long prose poem on maternity, in which childbirth becomes a metaphor for every sort of origin. Sometimes, however, he appears to view womanhood in the Latin manner, as an exotic and unfortunate condition (see his poem on the great, lost Audre Lorde.) Even in "The Pelvic Exam," in which the narrator-cum-doctor explores a teenage girl's pelvic cavity for signs of cancer, his empathy seems to be at war with his horror of being penetrated, of passivity: "At first the tears that drop are half-controlled. / Abnormal bleeding after periods / Has made her pain's unwilling centerfold." The book ends with Campo's fluid, admirable translations of Lorca's queer-themed Sonnets of Dark Love. The author also adds a note about Lorca's influence on his own work, explaining that he spent years "trying to make my English sound like Spanish, that elusive inner language of my lost childhood in Latin America." Whether he's succeeded in this bit of linguistic cross-pollination is hard to gauge. But in his frequent use of rhyme and his gift for observing his immediate environment, Campo has undoubtedly produced a satisfying, accessible body of work, which has won him a pair of Lambda Literary Awards and a nomination for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award. The poems in Diva, especially the title poem à clef on adolescent clarity and angst, should only extend his considerable audience. --Regina Marler
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