Robert Fernandez, _Las Moradas_

 IN MY OPINION, Robert Fernandez is one of the best poets now writing in the United States. It has been a while since his last book came out, so it is a fine thing to have this chapbook from Arrow As Aarow. 

Las Moradas ("the dwellings") is twenty-three poems "excerpted from The Living," as explained in an endnote. I've read it three times, each time more convinced that the "I" of the poems represents a unified character or perspective and the poems cohere, but until the whole of The Living appears, that will have to stand as simply my best guess.

The poems present us often with an "I," but rarely with a he, she, or they. A "sunflower man" appears, and a "master," and "the lyricists / along the river bank / playing soccer," but we mainly have a single person in the middle of a singularly intense passage. There is an important "you" in the fourth poem, and that "you" may be part of the "we" sometimes named. By and large, though, we are connected to an individual consciousness.

That consciousness is vibrantly attentive, marked by both desire and wariness. There are quite a few animals (a tiger, a wolf, vultures), and there is blood. There may be rituals or ceremonies--

(the soap-

stone sucks up the

splashing blood that resists

Brazil-wood bowls

as much as it can)

--and we may have the molecules of a sort of bildungsroman, as the speaker seems to in a period of new challenges and new dangers in the territory he (or she--"moradas" brings to mind Teresa of Avila) is exploring. We get hints that the passage will prove transformative:

it is the first gnosis

fist host been but eye can see

it is the chapter of hammers

of froms

of planes

And in the final poem, we even get a sense of arrival:

& for a moment 

there was a world

 

there was a world

& silos still-

ly in the distance

I don't know why I think those silos mean we got the harvest in, the granaries are full, we got past the hammers, and we are going to be okay. But that is what I think. 

I'll have to wait for The Living to see how good my guess is. In the meantime, Las Moradas is definitely worth seeking out.  Thank you, Arrow As Aarow.