Few contemporary American writers have mapped the complex terrain of exile, language, gender and family as powerfully as Julia Alvarez. Born in 1950 in New York City and raised in the Dominican Republic until the age of 10, Alvarez has spent most of her literary career in the U.S. She has written s even novels for adults, five for children, four books of poetry and three essay collections. A writer-in-residence at Middlebury College for decades, she now lives on a farm in Weybridge. Her first poetry collection in 15 years was released in April. Called Visitations, it’s a testimony to love, writing, mourning and celebration — in other words, the book of a lifetime. Alvarez is best known for her award-winning novels, including In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, but poetry was her first genre. The poems in her latest volume feel intimate and anecdotal, momentary. A memory arrives unexpectedly; an old self resurfaces; past relationships reemerge; language is rediscovered. The result is a deeply personal collection that reflects the poet’s journey through the beauty and pain of living in multiple worlds. The deeply personal collection reflects the poet’s journey through the beauty and pain of living in multiple worlds. These poems offer different versions of herself that “visit” in later life: the young Dominican girl growing up under a dictatorship; the immigrant child struggling to master English in New York; the ambitious student discovering literature at the library; the daughter learning her mother’s language for menses; the four sisters knowing each others’ thoughts as if through clairvoyance. We also hear from the first wife discovering her clanging unhappiness, the lover naming birds with her new Adam, and the older woman confronting aging and mortality. The book’s title, Visitations, is a reference to a biblical story in which Elizabeth tells Mary that she will be the mother of Jesus Christ. Alvarez draws from this story to illustrate how she was visited — by poetry — when she was young and how its spirit continues to animate her. When she was a child in the Dominican Republic, Alvarez’s parents required their children to memorize poetry and perform it at family celebrations while sporting frilly dresses. These performances helped her to become, in the lines of the Ruben Darío piece she most often performed, a “star / in the blue immensity.” Poetry offered her a model for how to live a human life. Alvarez first performed poetry in a country where writing it might result in retribution. Her family lived under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, whose brutal regime controlled nearly every aspect of Dominican life for more than 30 years. Alvarez’s father became involved in a plot against Trujillo; when the conspiracy was discovered, the family fled to the United States in 1960. Alvarez has often described this migration as the defining rupture of her life. Once in the U.S., as she recounts in the poem “Visitations,” Alvarez began to memorize famous English poems and recite them to her family. Eventually, of course, she began to write her own. In the book’s first poem, “Recitation,” we see Alvarez ready to perform: “prettied and prepped, like a small divinity,” she is “to make the difference.” After the food, her gathered family and friends are nourished by language. Alvarez writes about the smells of sancocho and sofrito, about her tías and sisters, about the spiritual hope that resonated after she recited poetry. Visitations by Julia Alvarez, Knopf, 112 pages. $27. As a resident of rural Vermont, Alvarez writes movingly about its landscape and people. The poem “I Go Through the House, Turning Off Lights,” about a dinner party in her home, turns, once the guests leave and her husband is asleep, to the war in Gaza. The speaker is “Dismayed to be spared in this ark of a house / Afloat among the wreckage of a world at war.” A good meal and a terrible war converge in her mind; despite the repast, she cannot shake “the gloom we could not lift.” The less explicit strength of Alvarez’s new collection lies in the connections it forges between patriarchal history and the nuclear family. She writes about large historical forces without losing sight of the ordinary human vulnerability of individual men and women, especially her mother and father. Her father is easiest — a romantic hero in her imagination. In “On Sundays,” when offered the choice between going to church with Mami or the beach with Papi, Alvarez chooses Papi, “as if to whisper in his ear, I’m yours.” “Papi’s Clocks” identifies her father as “a docent of the language of Cervantes” in direct contrast to the American dads of her new classmates, with their “suntanned smiles of condescension.” But the most complex and beautiful images in this volume are reserved for women — her sisters and, especially, her mother. In “At the Mental Health Clinic Waiting Room,” Alvarez writes that her mother “locked / her love up for a rainy day.” But she also offered each of her four daughters a future, in the form of a bathrobe. In “The Red Bathrobe,” the speaker finally puts the robe on, having rejected it when she was younger, realizing that her mother was correct: “Her face reflected in my face.” The final line of the poem — “Do me a favor. Just try them on” — is her mother’s voice, which lingers after her daughter’s. If only in the poem, her mother lives on. Alvarez’s mother is not the only ghost in the volume. The speaker is also visited by Maury, her oldest sister, who took her own life. The poems about these and other lost women are elegiac but not sentimental. It is hard not to see the tenderness and wisdom in the writing; where there is grief, there is also gratitude. But they also contain self-recrimination: Did Alvarez appreciate them enough? The answer is always, truly, no — but perhaps also yes. At the end of the volume, the reader senses that the poet is hoping and praying for herself, for them and for us all: “in the name of the Bee and the Butterfly and the Breeze, Amen.” Alvarez’s childhood performances bookend the collection, inviting her audience to enter into the poetry as her first audiences did: as if her words had the power to make their lives richer and more meaningful. Recalling these childhood gatherings, Alvarez hopes, as she writes in the collection’s last poem, “Sobremesa,” that “at least one poem finds a fervent lover like the Matanzas, or the women gathered on Mami’s patio in childhood, who leaned in to listen to my recitations, hungering for something they couldn’t put into words, and found briefly in poetry.” The word sobremesa describes the feeling of lingering at the table long after the food is gone, a cherishing of time spent together performing, singing and celebrating. This collection, in some sense, is its own sobremesa, which we share with Alvarez as we read and reread the poems. ➆ Alvarez appears at Back Roads Readings, Sunday, August 2, 3 p.m., at Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro. Free. juliaalvarez.com The original print version of this article was headlined “Dancing With Ghosts | Book review: Visitations by Julia Alvarez” The post Book Review: ‘Visitations’ by Julia Alvarez appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less