Notes from Source: Mother Muse is part elegy for, part celebration of, two Jamaican women, Sister Mary Ignatius, who reformed truant boys, and Margarita Mahfood (Margarita Mahfouz), a local rhumba queen.1 Known as the “nun who nurtured reggae,” Sister Iggy produced important local musicians at the Alpha Boys School. If the poet’s concerns are drenched in familiar tropes, they’re dead honest and unremitting, even about murder: “Because, she dance half naked./ Because, she give him him medicine late./ Because, he said, she stab herself” The inflections of island patois keep these poems at a distance of unfamiliarity, while bringing close the rhythms of home. Against Silence., a title that faces the long silence to come, is unfortunately more Dramamine than drama, too much Ralph Richardson, too little Laurence Olivier, except when Bidart tosses in a pinch of Grand Guignol: “natural/ pity// soon ends/ when what pity unleashes is CHAOS”2 Now short, now long, the lines mostly just lie there, uncertain of their standing, bitter in their very existence, as if Bidart were so neurotically uncomfortable writing in his own skin that the mask of persona proves, not a way to smuggle stagecraft into poetic art, but a device to avoid the privacies of the private. Sidelong references to an unhappy childhood and his parents’ miserable marriage are more thoroughly redacted than a cia file: “Thirst no well can satisfy.// The well of affection that bloods the house is poisoned.// Love that bloods the house is poisoned.”

Further Notes: Num Pages: 70-77 Place: New York, United States Publisher: Foundation for Cultural Review Section: Verse chronicle