Jailbreak of Sparrows: Poems
“exfoliates the surface layers to discover the hidden elements the poet—with a deft knowing—reveals inside this masterful collection.”
Immediately upon opening the covers of National Book Award winner Martín Espada’s Jailbreak of Sparrows, a reader is drawn into the scene of the book’s title poem. “My grandmother caught Cousin Gisela on the couch with the plastic / slipcovers,” he writes, “that would squeak whenever anybody sat down, leafing / through the socialist newspaper called Claridad smuggled into the house . . .”
Espada—a poet not inclined to mince his words—is forthright in laying out language that plunges into the poem’s creative structure, exposing both a framework and a deep dive into the forbidden world’s lust for freedom in the middle of political oppression, showing the socialist newspaper as “worse than a wisp of marijuana smoke or a boy slipping his hands / into forbidden places. Tata’s battle cry of Ay bendito sprayed the air.” The poem continues later:
“I remember my Uncle Paul, late at night, perched on the corner of the couch,
rocking like a man with a bolero ticking deep inside, tilting a bottle of beer
into his mouth, talking to me. Do you know what that is? he said, pointing
to the fan in the window, flapping in the heat: Puerto Rican air-conditioning.
“Now, his daughter scanned the pages of Claridad for the socialistic words
colonialism and independence, empire and political prisoner, for news
of the festival where singers would sing the words a poet wrote in his cell
years ago to praise his beloved at the jailhouse door, as the crowd would sing
the verses that flew like a jailbreak of sparrows from the poet’s hands.
Now, my grandmother, an informer trembling to burst with the intelligence
of a subversive plot, called her brother Roberto to say: Gisela’s reading Claridad.”
And so, on the first page of the first poem of Espada’s deep-cutting collection of poems, a reader is already drawn into what will fulfill its suggested promise of exposing not just the meat, but bones and even the marrow of this world in a hyperfocus of conflict and punishment, resolution and a hope for freedom that clearly stated, everyone deserves. This is the work that poets struggle their entire lives to unfold, and Espada has managed this almost magic-trick feat of potent reality in just the first few pages of his new book. That first poem, near its end, after laying down the bricks that make the cobblestones of its worn and irregular pathways, says:
“Walking through Utuado in the year 1967, my father saw a shack abandoned
somewhere between the river and a great cave, the door’s face withered
by rain and sun, the cinder block and chicken wire gate keeping no one out,
slats collapsing in the window without eyes to see. The eyes in the poster
nailed to the shack stared back at him: Governor Muñoz Marín, friend of JFK
and the FBI, the Free Associated State and the Law of the Muzzle, the Jalda
arriba jingle on the radio and the Thunderbolt in the sky. Puerto Rico counts
on you, the poster said, to continue progress up the hill. Vote on the mountain!
Beneath the glower and jowls of the governor, the red silhouette of the peasant
in the straw hat promised, in words orbiting his head: Bread, Land, Freedom.”
Espada creates a deep sense of place through his wordcraft in this collection, whether that sense is political, territorial or personal. In his poem, “Moderation: For Dog,” he opens:
“I am the Antichrist, you cried from the window of your car as we hydroplaned
through another snow shower in Wisconsin. I am the Antichrist, you bragged
to the woman in the booth at the parking lot, ice in your beard, your eyes red,
and she smiled like a Lutheran waiting to wake up from a nightmare. I am his
social worker. His medication has worn off, I said. There was no social worker
and no medication.”
“And as he lays down the gesso on the canvas of the poem, with continued deft brush strokes later in “Moderation” Espada writes, “Sometimes you were a satyr, head stuck between the curtains of the shower, / two spikes of hair soaped up like horns. Sometimes you were a wrinkled tailor, / wailing in Yiddish at the other tailor in the shop: You’re pissing down my back!” In the final stanza, the poet—as if a reporter—states, “There was no social worker there that night. The medication must have worn / off, leaving a Jewish cowboy from Newark alone with his Colt .45. The night / your brother told me, I stopped sleeping. I swallow the pills in your memory.”
It isn’t that Espada’s use of language is just an exercise in structure or a display of his prowess as a poet. It is the root of what the poet excavates that makes his poems in this collection so very powerful. Anyone can write and any poet can fill the pages, collecting words, thoughts and deeper-seated concepts within the ink laid on the page. Espada has done more than that. His poems explore the depths beyond the elements of structure. He goes beyond concept to create a rhythm of life that free springs from the page like a diver from a cliff. And not knowing the depth till the plunge is committed, readers of Jailbreak of Sparrows will find themselves floating into vast waters that are far more substantive that anything they might have imagined. This is why poets write poetry, and Martín Espada has shown that he knows all of that “why” and more.
As he writes in his poem, “I Must Be The Steamship Morro Castle”:
“Even now, my bones believe I must be the steamship Morro Castle, cruising
from La Habana, run aground two hundred feet from the boardwalk,
the captain in his quarters dead after dinner, no one at the wheel, no
living soul aboard, aristocrats and stowaways spun in the vortex of the sea,
lifeboats clinging to the wreck, the fire that gutted the ship still glowing.”
Then several lines later, as the poem continues, “Every year in October, I testified to you the way eyewitnesses once / testified in fountain pen on postcards about the ship of dead souls / that came to rest in these waters, smoke pouring from the wounds,” it becomes evident that it is precisely the bones of the poet that have managed to put together this essential, personally shaking collection that is filled with the real, the surreal, and their intersection, as laid out in his poem, “Award Ceremony Nightmare With Swedish Meatballs” where he writes:
“I was sitting at a banquet table before the awards ceremony.
A distinguished character actor, who narrated the PBS documentary
I saw last night, entered the banquet hall in a white jacket.
He was a server. I was about to ask, Are you him? when he fired
a Swedish meatball at my head. I could tell it was a Swedish meatball
because of the cream sauce. He fired another one and another one.
Most of them missed, but some dripped down my forehead and my neck.
I wondered why this actor kept throwing Swedish meatballs at me,
why they weren’t papas rellenas, fried potato balls stuffed with ground
beef, the Puerto Rican meatball smuggled inside a crunchy potato.
“I woke up cackling. My wife stared at me, as she often does.
She wanted to know why I was laughing in my sleep. I need to be
heavily sedated. I need more pills, flying at me like Swedish Meatballs.”
Martín Espada’s poetry collection, Jailbreak of Sparrows, shows readers why poets write. But more than that, it exfoliates the surface layers to discover the hidden elements the poet—with a deft knowing—reveals inside this masterful collection. That Espada’s poems are worth the read goes without saying. That he has created a groundbreaking work that other poets will reference is notable. The poems in Espada’s collection do more—they unpack and engage their material in ways that expand the domain of poetry—and deserve and demand to be read.