This Craft, As With a Woman Loved: Selected Poems by Artemio Tadena

Edited by Gemino H. Abad and Myrna Peña-Reyes This selection of Artemio Tadena’s poetry honors him as a poet par excellence. A first encounter with his poems might immediately remark certain distinctive features of his own way with that “imperial tongue” called English from which he forges “the language of our blood”—such features as a mazy, interstitial syntax and unusual words and word-formations which simulate a dramatic performance: that is, the flow and rhythm of the verses enforce the pulse of thought and feeling of the imagined lyric speaker’s action. We see this, for instance, in one of his finest historical narratives, Two Days in October, where “Che” Guevara and Fidel Castro converse and affirm two opposing yet noncontradictory views of a fellow revolutionary’s cause. The tone of the lyric speaker’s voice, as in most of the poems, is seemingly colloquial, matter-of-fact, and yet, quite rich and robust. Yes, Tadena’s poems aren’t easy reading; “California and the Stallion, L