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Tom Holmes

After Malagueña

Poems after

Federico García Lorca's

"Malagueña"

Tom Holmes is a co-founding, co-editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics. His works have appeared in the anthology September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond and in a handful of journals, most recently Terminus. He has earned an MA in Literature from SUNY Brockport and an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. He currently survives in Spokane, Washington, with his wife, Michelle Bonczek.

Comments about the book:

Tom Holmes' Lorca-inspired and Death-suffused Malagueña sequence reads as a single poem, hypnotic in effect and delivering us to where "there's a smell of salt / and women's blood / from the feverish flowers / by the sea"; to where "there are mounds of dung / & lamb's wool / piled in the seas / flooding the world". Each section is a further location of this place in us where Death, who "sleeps / with orchids", resides, the place of poetry itself.

-William Heyen

After Malagueña is both a deft formal homage to Lorca's moody poem and a shrewd reinvention of it in contemporary guise: "there's an odor of sex / & rotting fish / from the beach / across the street // Death comes / once a week / to sing…." In this stark, vivid sequence, Tom Holmes touches us with a hand as chilling as it is true. As the best poets always do, he sings not against death, but with it, reminding us of what we know.

-Stan Sanvel Rubin

Tom Holmes has written a wonderfully comic and powerful invocation of Lorca in After Malagueña. Death appears in the most outrageous of places, not just in the bar of Lorca's poem, but at a wedding, in the courtroom, and in the school where he "stays late / to clean erasers"-what wonderful irony: the great eraser cleans erasers! And in all the humor and close quarters of Lorca's original form, there's a dark reminder that Death is coming and leaving, and a reminder, too, of what poetry can do.

-Gerry LaFemina

First Tom Holmes resurrects Lorca's character Death in a new translation of "Malagueña," then he follows as Death strolls from the bar in which Lorca found him out into a world as familiar and proximate as the grass stains on a child's dress and as strange and obliterating as the seas flooding the world of our dreams. The patterns of these poems' music comes in large measure from Lorca, but this is Death as Holmes knows him-revolutionary, educator, wedding guest, gig singer, unearther of orchids. This is a wonderful series, as companionable as it is haunting, and it marks the debut of a powerful new talent.

-Jonathan Johnson

Who says you can't quarrel with a translation and praise a new poet's riffs on Lorca-all at the same time? In After Malagueña, Tom Holmes gives us twelve sharp and disturbing ways of looking at Lorca. It's good to have this new and intriguing work among us.

-Greg Glazner

Table of Contents

Preface 7

Malagueña

(Federico García Lorca) 11

Malaguena 12

Death's Gig 13

Death Keeps Tabs 14

Til Death Do Us Part 15

Death Finds Religion 16

Death Educates 17

Death Goes Downtown 18

Death Draws Attention 19

Death Tries Usury 20

Death Has His Say 21

Death Decorates 22

Death Sleeps 23

From the book:

Malagueña

La muerte

entra y sale

de la taberna.

Pasan caballos negros

y gente siniestra

por los hondos caminos

de la guitarra.

Y hay un olor a sal

y a sangre de hembra,

en los nardos febriles

de la marina.

La muerte

entra y sale,

y sale y entra

la muerte

de la taberna.

by Federico García Lorca

Malaguena

Death comes

to the bar

& goes

passes the black horses

& people fated to paths

with hollow guitars

& there's a smell of salt

& women's blood

from the feverish flowers

by the sea

Death

comes & goes

from the bar

Death

goes & comes

ISBN 0-941053-63-6

After Malagueña is a 28 page hand-sewn chapbook - $7.00

TO ORDER After Malagueña ON-LINE

To order through mail click here.

Thank you for your support!


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