Woman Of The River

The noted author of Flowers from the Volcano speaks of political realities with an impassioned objectivity in these poems about Central America, which confront the loss of lives as well as the slow extinction of spirit, of a culture's mythology, when war and political tyranny invade the heart of both private and public worlds.

One of the major voices in Latin American poetry presents a collection of poems that address the political realities of contemporary Central America, containing many works that are political, direct, and critical of the United States' presence in Latin America.

Alegria's vese is plainspoken, not at all given to elusive metaphor or dense language, as though her mission were too urgent for such roadblocks. Her tools are a keen visual memory (or as she says, 'anaconda eyes'), an ear for a good story, and a knack for building to a flourish. . . . Woman of the River shows that Claribel Alegria has the grace to take new risks and land on her feet.

This bilingual collection directly addresses expatriate Alegria's political ideology and, by means of vibrant, effective images, elevates it to an aesthetic plane.

Permeated with tropical colors, smells, flowers, trees, volcanos, and people, these poems constitute a beautiful and moving collection, that will interest both undergraduate and undergraduate libraries.

As in her previous book of poems, Flowers from the Volcano, she has demonstrated in Woman of the River that she possesses an uncanny ability to explore and unveil the most demonic forces that drain the vitality of the collective unconscious and threaten to turn everything that is beautiful and sacred about life into a profane hallucination. . . . the most luminous voice of contemporary Central American poetry to resonate on the northern shores of this hemisphere.

The rich political poems in the collection defy the foreign influences, mostly North American, which continue to damage the Latin American peoples and land. And with dramatic visual, oral and nearly clairvoyant majesty, they praise the known and unknown people, creatures and plush landscapes of Alegria's native Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Reading the work of Central American poet Claribel Alegria is a fiercely moving experience.

A native of Nicaragua, Alegria can bare her deepest emotions, expressing love on one page and lashing out at the injustices served to people on the next. She is a political poet in the sense that common humanity and dignity rise above all intimacies of human life.