Finding Cuba, by Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner

Josephine Jacobsen says that she began writing poetry when she had experiences for which no adequate language existed. Only a new poem, she discovered, could reach toward the reality she had experienced. In the opening section of Jill Peláez Baumgaertner's new collection of poems, Finding Cuba, this function of poetry is inventively extended to experiences that belong not to the poet but to her Cuban ancestors. Born in the U.S., Baumgaertner seeks to find the Cuba in herself by finding language for the inner life of her forebears. Her initial knowledge of their lives is limited to a few facts, photos and anecdotes. But a poet's knowledge is mainly through the imagination, and this poet has imagination in abundance.

Baumgaertner's imagination is most animated by her paternal grandmother, who came to Cuba in 1905 as a young Irish-American, married a Cuban and stayed through years of a conventional marriage. ("She thought she might die wrapped in such whiteness.") But then she fled, and became a Ziegfield girl. In her longing to know this mysteriously adventurous woman, Baumgaertner shares memories--even memories of "something that never happened"--by finding images that evoke them. The tour de force of Finding Cuba is that its poems make an imagined past seem more sparklingly vivid and urgent than most people's present lives.

In "Leaving Eden," the book's second section, the poet continues to explore themes of memory and identity, of female creative energy, and of the mysterious power of language. An interwoven sequence of poems starts in the biblical garden, then--in a bold move that Baumgaertner makes seem natural--follows Adam and Eve through a series of post-Eden vignettes set in the contemporary world.