SONJA SWIFT Reviews
Presentimiento:
a life in dreams by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
(Autumn House Press,
2016)
[First published in eleveneleven: A Journal of Literature &
Art, Issue 21, California College of the
Arts, 2016]
Presentimiento is an exploration of place, home, and
heritage. Alternating between prose poems and longer essays, weaving in
fictionalized vignettes and even incorporating moments of magical realism,
Fletcher writes with a mesmerizing love of and attention to the New Mexican
landscape.
The writing itself
is enchanting with a kind of rugged grace. Paced slowly at first it then
lunges, unexpectedly, into intensity. Death. Pneumonia. Giving birth.
Rattle-snake eyed wayward. Murder. New Mexico trail of tears. The complex
histories of New Mexico woven into the narrative of one family and that
family’s own unique history: Catholic Spanish immigrant perspective. Catholic
Spanish immigrants who bonded to and were changed by the New Mexico landscape,
because landscape comes with its own spirituality.
The consistent
thread throughout is Fletcher’s own mother: her own particular attention to
details, love of plants and terrain, stalwart in her respect for miracles and a
higher power. Fletcher visited her in writing this book and writes of their
time time together spent pruning weeds in her garden, touring old haunting
grounds, graveyards and memory places. This narrative keeps the older
histories, ancestors, and more distant memories grounded in the present time.
Fletcher’s
depictions are especially poetic and evocative:
When my mother
was a girl on the ranch in Corrales, whatever blew in from the llano stopped at
their door. Beggars. Wanderers. Outlaws. Poisonous things.” (16)
With her thumb
and forefinger she rubs olive wood beads, which drink in her sweat and oil and
hope and fear, deep as memory, thirsty as bone. (100)
Returning home
from the badlands after my father died, she stopped at Jemez Pueblo to rest. My
mother met an old man who sat apart from the other villagers with his work
displayed before him on a blanket—rattles of squash and pumpkin shaped into the
animals of his dreams…she chose a teardrop gourd with moon eyes at one end and
a fishhook tail at the other, painted with black and white and rust-red
feathers…the flying serpent. Symbol of water, wind, rebirth. (201)
Homing, rescue,
root, trespass, imprint, shrine, and nostalgia are all chapter headings. Each
one is also a definition, an exploration into the varied meaning of words.
There is a similar kind of appreciation for how much meaning can be instilled
in the small things, mementos, found objects weathered and rusted, which
carries on as a theme throughout.
Beginning poems with
the title “Dreams of…” Fletcher weaves in his relatives’ names as he channels
these characters in visceral ways. Their personalities and unique life
experiences are each a window into a different time and era. Often these poems
are glimpses into the same patch of ground across generations. In this way
readers see how things change, are neglected, forsaken or forgotten. What
survives and what doesn’t. Like the manzano de San Juan, a neglected apple tree
on what used to be family land where Fletcher trespasses under a barbed wire
fence to pick his mother one so she can remember the sweet taste.
Fletcher, in
concluding, writes:
Home is a feeling. A faith. A way of seeing. A choice to belong. The land
reminds us of that. It invites us to see what is—not what was—or what we want
it to be. Maybe that’s what Carlos tried to tell my mother in her kitchen all
those years ago. The road back lies within. Each artifact is a compass of the
heart. The loving wind is a warm current connecting us all to that place, no
matter how far away we might travel. To find that vision, that presentimiento,
I need only close my eyes. (241)
Colt 45. Black
leather. Badlands. Skulls. A spur mark sunken into pine. Thunderheads. Bruised
sky. Manzanilla tea. Saints. Juniper. Gravestones smashed and shot with
bullets. Buckskin plains. PiƱon. Hibernating rattlers. Turquoise bolo. Navajo
blankets. Rosewater. Artifacts wanted because they were forgotten. Places where
it won’t rain anymore. Until a prayer is made. And the skies darken. Miracles
and ranch life. Such are further examples of Presentimento’s detail, redolent of the world you are lured
into in this book.
*****
Sonja Swift has
publications in Dark Matter: Women Witnessing,
Chrysalis Journal and Langscape
Magazine.
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