Poetry by Patria Rivera

But a good year for poetry

Puti/White chronicles the exile’s condition and the conditions leading to exile, without guile, nostalgia or pity. Right from the bilingual title of Rivera’s very fine collection, which was justly a finalist for this year’s Trillium Prize in poetry, oppositions exist in unquestioned juxtaposition: home with exile, belonging with exclusion, torture with moments of breathtaking and breath-giving grace… An absorbing and promising first book, Puti/White suggests an alternative to homelessness, inviting us instead to be multi-homed, learning the past by heart without wearing it on our sleeves.

~Katia Grubisic, The Globe and Mail

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THE BRIDE ANTHOLOGY, 2007

Patria Rivera’s second book with Frontenac, The Bride Anthology, is a worthy successor to her earlier collection, Puti / White (2005). Subtitled “A tidy treatise on love and its malfunctions,” this one’s more focused and, indeed, the frequent use of matrimonial imagery and re-imagined tropes from the romantic poetry of yore is sweet to the tongue and mind, and rich as marzipan come upon wrapped in a serviette in a secret compartment of a hope chest.

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I’m tempted to say that Rivera is drawing from a deeper well than the other two poets — I can hear echoes of Wallace Stevens, Yeats, other early Modernists — but, of course, we’re just following a different aesthetic here: more impasto, fewer pointillists dots perhaps.

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The sly wit and humour are still here, as is the tight control of melody and rhythm:

Every petal is like a period when a hen sits on an egg,

incubating its step into an entreaty, a dot to catch a spot,

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and while traveling from place, slides uncontrollably,

like a mussel menacing the lake. Isn’t that adorable! Posed

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as a lateral start, the holy man utters the word as a sham move,

it’s not free of charge; it is, shod in white, thinhorn sheep …

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(“Turning rose petals to gold”)

The Bride Anthology is as tasty as it gets in Canada, and the poet is as adept with a strophe as she is with a distich. Indeed, Rivera uses all the resources of the poet with equal aplomb: recurrent motifs and cognate imagery at the atomic level; tropes and schemes at the sub-atomic level. It’s a rich collection and one I’m likely to return to, to sip at awhile in the shade.

~Richard Stevenson, Northern Poetry Review

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'A collection in the truest and most traditional sense'

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The one that stands out of the eight for me was Patria Rivera’s The Bride Anthology. I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect from something with that title, but that collection is a collection in the truest and most traditional sense: you see a thematic unity across all of the poems. Rivera is quite adept at showing the obsession around the wedding to the extent that it becomes not only about a particular couple, but is symbolic of a specific set of social relations, both familial and extrafamilial in scope. I was particularly impressed by the way Rivera is able to use the endless iterations of perspective that occur during the preparations for a wedding and during the ceremony itself. Various figures get lyrical attention here, including figures like the bridesmaids, the groom, and the mother-in-law. What Rivera concentrates upon is the spectacle and the splendor of weddings: “Not queasy about being photographed without enough/ background light, the bride, poured, zipped, and hooked into/ her rich cream gown” (32). These events clearly are part of a very specific commodity culture that generates a tremendous amount of rich and particular vocabularies: we get many types of fabrics, many colors, many different precious stones, descriptions of light. This collection functions to elucidate the various literacies of the wedding and of the marriage. 

— AsianAm Lit Fans

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