Review by Jami Macarty
In Songs for the Land-Bound, Violeta Garcia-Mendoza sings of “memory, art, turbulence” in a woman’s relationship to motherhood, marriage, aging, writing, spirituality, and “wilderness.” Garcia-Mendoza’s assured and refined debut, divided into six bird-ornamented sections, documents the “complications” of her subjects by employing contrasting modes of discourse that illustrate the “fights between” and “the opposite effect” of dichotomous thinking, creating a dynamic interplay between coupling and countering within the choices of poetic form, linear organization, and noun constructions.
Garcia-Mendoza juxtaposes various forms: a nocturne counters an aubade, odes oppose an epithalamium, the prose of a haibun contrasts with the verse of a sonnet, the erasure found in a collage compares to the patchwork technique of a cento, and still lifes stand in contrast to “dioramas.” Within these forms, lines are often stanzaically organized in couplets or tercets, reinforcing the interplay of coupling and countering. This duality is also expressed in word pairings such as “the conditional, the subjunctive”; “relentlessness or restlessness”; and “bless & burn,” as well as through the progressions of three nouns: “starlings, selfies, sinkholes”; “soldier, poet, or king”; “color, time, light.” Gentle enjambment highlights the poet’s fine attention to the potential meanings that arise from additive and oppositional units of meaning.
Garcia-Mendoza’s narrative-lyric poems cycle “if, when, where” while considering “the carrion, the carry on, the carrying” that defines the life of a middle-aged woman. As the poet considers a “sense of life debt,” she acknowledges the “dread and marvel” of language, wilderness, and familylife, each seen as a “romance / with the unreliable,” “bearing / darkness.”
To counter the notion of “solastalgia,” the poet denies nothing but makes deliberate choices. She asserts: “My moral code is making”; “Revision means survival.” Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s Songs for the Land-Bound are “illuminant over the scar.” Her poems of “wreckage strung with violets” — “music, all of it.”
Songs for the Land-Bound by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza. June Road Press, September 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.