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Wendy Klein

Poetry

Review of Cuba in the Blood - David Cooke - Acumen 108 - 2009

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Wendy Klein's debut collection, Cuba in the Blood, is a marvellously assured exploration of family history and cultural identity by a poet who evokes images of loss and rootlessness with the kind of authority that can only be validated by the pressure of real experience. The collection is divided into two complementary sections. The first of these, Cuba Notebook, describes vividly a visit she made to the island. In the opening poem, 'My First Cuba', she introduces the figure of her grandfather in terms which are dramatic and almost mythological, giving the reader a first insight into her family history:

High on a horse he takes command
of the island, the world, my heart;
serves the country that saved him
from Cossacks; sent him to occupy
the home of coconut palms, turquoise
water, bronzed faces.

Decades pass and the poet sees herself again as a young child sitting on her grandfather's lap. She is looking at his old photographs which become a metaphor for the craft of poetry: "The box is full of pictures / of dead people, and / if they're not put in right / the lid won't shut." It's as a result of this chance involvement of a Jewish refugee from Tsarist Russia in the Spanish-American War that she makes her pilgrimage to the island, describing it in a sequence of poems and brief journal entries:

I stand back, shelter in the dusk of a room
that will hold its dark and cool all day, hope
no one can see me in my nightdress, too white
and frilly against the glare of the tropical sun,
but no one is looking in this morning's Havana.
Out there, as remembered, the retinal overload
of rooftops red-tiled, houses hand-painted
in the pinks and greens of sherbert ....

Throughout these poem Klein entertains and convinces as she describes characters and scenes in language which has vigour and immediacy. There are also fine evocations of Cuba's revolutionary past in her portraits of Che Guevara and Hemingway.

The concluding section, 'Stops Along the Fault-line", examines in greater depth the family history invoked in 'My First Cuba'. These poems are more introspective and at times deeply moving, as here where she yearns for the mother who abandoned her: "I am from nowhere in particular / nowhere that's on any map / but I go back at certain times....search for clues in box / after box of torn photographs / tarnished costume jewellery / look for your face in shots / of high- breasted women." Equally poignant is the evocation other stepmother in 'Songs my Stepmother Taught me':

Your voice picked up volume
while your fingers picked out chords, not with the graceless
fumbling of your mothering, but gathering them into
submission with gentle respect;

In a brief review it is difficult to do justice to work of such quality, but mention must be made of 'The Letters Between Us', a tour de force where the poet attempts to assimilate her ancestral alphabets and 'Preserved', where she describes the "holy grail" of her grandmother's frigidaire.