cover image The Blood That Keeps Singing/La Sangre Que Sigue Canta

The Blood That Keeps Singing/La Sangre Que Sigue Canta

Clemente Soto Velez, Clemente Soto Velez, Clemente Soto VC)Lez. Curbstone Press, $9.95 (123pp) ISBN 978-0-915306-78-7

Influential in Puerto Rico as both a poet and an advocate for independence since 1928, Soto Velez makes a long overdue debut in English with this bilingual selection. In deft translations mostly of lengthy poetic sequences, Soto Velez often repeats a single word or phrase--such as ``hands'' (``Five Pointed Stars'') and ``I came to know him'' (``The Wooden Horse'')--in conjunction with ever-changing series of images. Hailing from European surrealism, these images consist of juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated objects--the letter ``h imprisoned in the honey of his bees.'' The result is that the repeated word or phrase appears in ever-new and unusual contexts: ``Hands that would burn the jail / with amnesiac memory, / where my shadow tempered / five guitars . . . .'' Through this aesthetic of paradox, this ``seductive repulsion of attraction,'' Soto Velez hopes to liberate the reader by suggesting new possibilities for perceiving reality. His aim is honorable, his technique challenging. But the reader requires and does not receive at least a few prosaic lines to explicate--or at least provide a stylistic variation to--the constant flurry of images. (Oct.)