AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "RICANTATIONS" BY PUERTO RICAN POET LORETTA COLLINS KLOBAH



LORETTA COLLINS KLOBAH, numbered among the major poets within the Puerto Rican literary scene, was born in Merced, California. She earned an M.F.A. in poetry writing from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she also completed a doctoral degree in English, with an emphasis on Caribbean literary and cultural studies. She spent four of the nine years of her doctoral study in Jamaica (Caribbean) and West Indian neighborhoods of Toronto (Canada) and London (UK). Since the late 1990s, she lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she is a professor of Caribbean literature and creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico.


Her poetry collection The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman (2011) received the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature in the poetry category and was shortlisted for the 2012 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection in the Forward Prize series. Her second poetry collection Ricantations (2018) earned a British Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a National Poetry Day selection. It was also longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize.


Together with Maria Grau Perejoan, Klobah edited and translated in English and Spanish The Sea Needs No Ornament / El Mar No Necesita Ornamento: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Caribbean Women Poets (2020).


Her literary awards include: the Pushcart Prize for Poetry, the Earl Lyons Award from The Academy of American Poets, the Pam Wallace Award for an Aspiring Woman Writer, the Daily News Prize for Poetry from The Caribbean Writer, and the Tom McAfee Discovery Award from The Missouri Review. She was also the recipient of a tuition scholarship at Breadloaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont.


Her poetry and scholarly essays have been published widely in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, BIM, Caribbean Beat Magazine, The Caribbean Writer, The Caribbean Review of Books, The Missouri Review, The Antioch Review, and other literary journals and anthologies.



Photo Credit: Peepal Tree Press Ltd., Leeds, United Kingdom (2018)




EXCERPTS FROM RICANTATIONS BY LORETTA COLLINS KLOBAH



Hurricane Maria wheeled over the sea,

a day away from upending and crushing cars,

prying roofs, plucking up electrical poles,

cracking trees to the stub,

flooding plantain fields of Yabucoa.

[...]

At the storm's transit from tropical to Cat 5,

I saw through louvred bedroom window,

an enormous old iguana, 5 or 6 feet

from nose to tail. He sat at the top corner

of my vine-covered fence,

bowing down chain-link with his weight.

His armour-plated face, rain-doused,

pointed into the wind. Spikes ridging his back

and black-striped tail, his orange neck flap

and haunches showed his age. In his heavy-lidded

green eyes, what knowledge? I was in the cabin

of a ship, and he was both captain and figurehead,

an ancient dragon sailing us into a sky bomb.

[...]






RICANTATIONS continued



Young iguanas, ousted from shorn treetops,

ran into the road and were run over.

Honey bees flew into our homes,

their hives and colonies carried away,

surviving plants disrobed of flowers and fruit.

Bats whisked overhead at twilight.


[...]


I fed honey bees, soaked napkins with sugar-water

and waggled the wet flags at them until

they surrendered and sipped to their fill.

But, I searched in vain for pure water

to bring to my diabetic daughter,

could invent no cooler for her insulin vials.

My ulcerated legs dripped sap and pus.

Doctors vanished. I let my daughter go

into safe exile, charitably evacuated.


[...]




RICANTATIONS continued



Nothing now is normal

though remaining trees rush to green up

and flower, dogs bark, and the sea still

waves its bacterial flag over the shores.

I hear quarrelling macaws and parakeets.

Ay Le Lo Lai songs move us,

but not to full tenderness.


Still, we feel new incantations of something

primal in us, allied by our hurricane grief,

disordered, but sentient of how we are related, neighbours,

iguanas, honey bees, bats, birds, trees, islands.

What is possible now? Can we do some things

differently now?



SOURCE: Poetry Collection Ricantations by Loretta Collins Klobah, published by Peepal Tree Press Ltd., Leeds, United Kingdom, 2018 (pp. 99-101).

[https://www.peepaltreepress.com/books/ricantations]