POETRY

MY WICKED WICKED WAYS by Sandra Cisneros (Turtle Bay Books: $15; 103 pp.). There’s some meat on the bones of Sandra Cisneros’ poetry but it’s dark meat. These are poems, she writes in her poem-preface, “I wrote when I was sad./ . . . With nothing in the texts to tell me.” In this collection, Cisneros writes her own text, and perhaps it would serve for other women as well. The first two of the book’s four sections are about Cisneros’ childhood with six brothers and other characters: her classmate Susan Reyna, who was fat and ugly, Abuelito, Blanca, Benny and Joe. There is a lot of Gwendolyn Brooks here, characters who are mostly caricature and regret; and Brooks’ flat-mouthed acceptance of ways of life that are not chosen so much as borne: Cisneros writes of an aunt, the family’s black seed and her prototype: She lived mistress./ Died solitary. Also like Brooks, there is a strong code of honor, words like shame and burning. The section titled “My Wicked, Wicked Ways” is almost entirely about how the poet failed her father, and how this failure cut her path. There is a wonderful quote from Maxine Hong Kingston on the frontispiece of this section--”Isn’t a bad girl almost like a boy?”--but perhaps this is also a way of trying to please her disgruntled parent, “to keep the good name clean.” The remaining two sections, “Other Countries,” and “The Rodrigo Poems,” are part postcard and part letter of regret. Of all the Mediterranean countries Cisneros travels through, Greece seems her place, just myth and elements, and the “ancient rage” of the women of Hydra. As for love, well, for Cisneros it seems to happen in the wrist, and then perhaps the heart.

I understand it as a kiss, by Sandra Cisneros

This gesture, this burning. But from an origin furthest from the heart. I recognize this is for me, and yet I sense I make no difference. I know if we say love we speak of many things. You mean the Buenos Aires

moon, the blond streetlamps, the dance you danced. But I know it as the wrist, a shoe, a bruise, a bone, a stick.